The idea that the passive voice is a bad thing is ridiculous. Why write off a third of the possible permutations of the language?
Is it restricted to the US? Teachers often required us to use passive voice (particularly past passive when describing experiments) in school.
Fascinating. I was about to say something to the effect that you just need to turn on the “Technical Writing” style if you’re going to be doing technical writing…so I went to check how to do that so I could mock the OP better.
Turns out this is one of the differences with the Mac version of Word. In the Mac version, you can choose the type of your document (In the “Spelling and Grammar” preferences), and “technical” automatically turns off passive voice checking.
In the Windows version (I checked both 2003 and 2007), I can’t figure out how to choose the document type, assuming that the setting even exists.
True, but you can wind up with some really torturous sentence structure that way that can actually be a barrier to clarity.
My deepest solidarity to the OP.
And while we’re at this: Messrs. Gates and Allen, I do hope y’all stole the Word “spelling/grammar checker” for Spanish, or at least got it on fire sale. Because if M$ actually paid good money to buy it from someone, you got ripped off like a mattress tag.
In that case, all the professor has to do is keep their grammar checker at a more nitpicky setting than yours for you to be screwed. If points are going to be lost because of that, then to be fair the grammar checker setting needs to be specified for everyone in the course syllabus.
Or you send the document in as a .pdf instead of a .doc file.
Do you and I have a problem I didn’t know about?
Sometimes you actually need to avoid naming the subect to avoid awkward constructions. As an example, fifty years ago you could write “Doctors vaccinate babies”, even though then as now, nurses could administer injections. It was unfair to the nurses to put it that way, but the publishers generally thought nobody minded, or at least nobody who mattered. So now it would have to be “Doctors and nurses vaccinate babies”, or “Medical professionals vaccinate babies.” It’s far better IMO to just say “Babies are vaccinated” IMO. Or it could be “Babies get vaccinations”, which technically does avoid the passive voice, but in the context the verb “get” is essentially passive in nature.
I’m not saying they’d actually take points off per green line. It just gives me the feeling that the professor sees it before reading and thinks “look at all these errors Word has picked up, he was obviously not trying too hard.”
No not at all. It was a bad joke. You’ll have to forgive me, I was running quite a fever yesterday. I wasn’t thinking all clearly.
I recently wrote a technical white paper in which I used active voice and a conversational tone to illustrate concepts and teach some fairly difficult ideas to engineers totally unfamiliar with the subject. I received a lot of compliments on the document, and it made a big enough splash that the company decided to make it part of the shipped training materials. As such, it was sent to the technical writing department for revisions, and the head writer stripped it of all active voice and all conversational tone, saying that this was inappropriate for a technical paper.
The new version looks professional and is still readable, but it’s dry and boring and likely to be used only by people who are in desperate need of sleep.
We need to get away from the notion that technical papers and scholarly works have to be written in a dull passive voice. People learn better when they are engaged with the material, and they’re likely to keep reading if the writing holds their attention.
Think about the best lecturers you ever had, and the worst. What’s the difference between them? The difference is usually that the bad lecturers speak in passive voice, while the good lecturers use active voice, personal anecdote, humor, and other techniques to keep your attention and illustrate critical concepts. Why should writing be any different?
That would be an awesome feature in Word. “This sentence is passive aggressive, consider a revision that expresses your anger directly.”
No worries. It’s pretty funny at that…there ought to be Passive Aggressive Voice, and just Aggressive Voice as well.
I think the passive aggressive voice would be: Juanita being delighted by Michelle, but no one ever thinks to delight me because they only think about themselves.
The aggressive voice would be: Holy fucking flying cocks is Juanita ever being delighted THE FUCK OUT by Michelle.
Why would it be restricted to the people who are most likely to simplify grammar? I suspect it’s much more common in, for example, India than in the US.
One day when I was in grad school in Miami, one of the other Spaniards joined our table, put his tray down, sat, pushed the tray away and started theatrically crying onto the table. A few "there there"s later, he explained that he’d just come from one of his classes in Psychology of Language (he was an undergrad, a Psychology major), the subject for the day being the Passive Voice. After half an hour, one of the students (those American students who according to European teachers are “so much better at asking questions”) had raised his hand and asked “what is this passive voice thing?” The teacher asked who didn’t know it. Seeing the forest of hands, she then asked who did know it: only the Italian and the Spaniard, out of over 100 students.
English needs better impersonals. In Spanish, reports can be made impersonal through the usage of the Passive Voice, the Impersonal Voice and Impersonal Structures, but then, we’re also used to not needing to smack the subject into every Active Voice sentence…
I think most of Germanic languages, at least those in the German-Dutch-English group, are similar in this respect. IIRC German has only one impersonal, or “middle voice” verb–heißen (“to be named”). English used to have a cognate to that but it died out around the time of Chaucer.
Leaving out the subject, and hence the passive “is” works fine for signs and slogans (like “No Smoking”), but not for formal writing.
I’m a technical writer who has a company with the opposite directions. I am Forbidden from writing using passive voice, even if passive is the best way to phrase the information so that the user can understand.
Note, too, that I write Reference material. Mostly tables of information with some text wrapped around them. The company’s “one size fits all” rules for writing do not take the document’s usage into consideration, they just say, “all docs must be done this way”. We are forbidden to use “is”. sigh Nobody reads my documents like a book. They want to know what setting the widget needs to be at to keep it from blowing up and that’s it. Like looking up a single word in a dictionary as opposed to reading the dictionary from front to back.
I’m all for using active voice when appropriate, but this “thou shalt not” kind of attitude chaps my ass.
Americans don’t simplify grammar. They simplify spelling.
Yep. We also don’t assume that the the verb “to have” is both passive and negative by its merest presence. “I have a lollipop,” by some grammar software I threw away, is passive. I don’t know nearly enough grammar for a formal discussion, but I can see that it is a more direct or appropriate construction than, “The lollipop is mine.”
Grammar as well; not in that you modify those forms you use to be simpler than when other speakers use them, but in that you’re more likely to choose a simpler form when two are available. People from other English-speaking countries are more likely to pick “wordier” forms, specially in formal situations. Where someone from Scotland may say “excuse me, would you please take a look at this?” an American may say “check this out please.”