I swear I have no idea what you people are talking about. There are days on this board I’m afraid to say anything for fear I’ll anger someone with my poor grammar skills.
You know what drives me crazy? People who go crazy over stupid shit. That’s what drives me crazy.
Now, now. Posting a peeve in an opinion discussion forum is not so crazy, is it?
I like being aware of the passive voice, noticing when others use it (because it should conjure questions about why they might want to hide the doer), and occasionally using it for fun (witness the glistening “Mistakes were made.”).
My special gripe is its exalted status in the social sciences. I actually suspect that some of the enormous style guides writers must contend with in those tedious fields insist on using it.
I have a wonderful book, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. He writes
I mention this mainly to tout the book, which I find almost delicious.
It’s odd that I own the book, which is “useless” for me! I write no fiction, and my non-fiction writing skills are so poor, I’d need something more basic to help me improve. But I stumbled across it while browsing randomly in a used-book store, glanced at some pages, and was captivated! 
Passive voice is when the do-er of the action isn’t mentioned in the sentence, or at least, not in the first part. Instead the object (the thing or person that was done to) is made the subject of the sentence. It’s usually done with helping verbs: “I was hit by his car.” instead of “His car hit me.” or “The memos were circulated” instead of “John Smith circulated a memo.” It can often come across as weaseling, officious or lawyery in tone.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
That’s not passive, it’s a simple past tense.
That’s what I get for trying to be funny.
It’s this kind of blanket, formulaic statement that made Strunk and White cause more harm than good–leading to automatic, reflexive, unthinking approaches to writing, which ignore the reality and full complexity of the language.
He has a point in that fiction in general doesn’t call for as much passive construction, but this assertion seems to me more motivated by a pretense that he possesses some kind of sage yet easy lesson to teach the world.
Sure, but if we were to plug Dickens into the Strunk and White or John Gardner computer programs for “good” fiction, this sentence and many others would be rejected as “unclear.” Those algorithms don’t accept that at times authors specifically want to be nonspecific, and to good effect.
I’m a government contractor and in government usage, the passive is very definitely consciously used to hide the actor and obfuscate responsibility. When the instructor in one of our writing classes insisted we re-write passive voice into active voice and identify the actors, one senior person raised his hand and asked, “Won’t we make a lot of people mad if we do that?”
I write and review/edit environmental impact statements as a part of my job. I end up correcting a lot of passive voice.
For example, a paragraph will lead off with “Surveys for the endangered festering bogslime were conducted in July 2010.” Who conducted the surveys? The applicant? The regulatory agency? The contractor? The resource agency? Who knows, from that sentence?
I’ll allow some passive voice in the 3rd or 4th sentence of a paragraph once the doer of the action is firmly established and to vary the writing tone a bit. But WAY too many times the responsible acting party is obscured by passive voice. This is especially important becasue the target audience includes people who don’t understand the different relationships and responsibilities between the agencies, contractors, etc.
Yes, actors, unless it can be proven otherwise, are fictions.
I quoted a wonderful book by a man considered almost a legend as a teacher of fiction-writing, and someone, who almost surely has never even read the book(!), insults him on the basis of one, abbreviated, paragraph!
This is the kind of response that is starting to drive me crazy here at SDMB.
Can you be more specific? Because there was that one guy who couldn’t end a sentence or use punctuation, and, while we all dealt with only one paragraph, everyone in the thread agreed that he always wrote in that manner.
I make no defence of the sentences quoted, but only observed that as a matter of simple fact they were not instances of the passive voice - and as clarity goes, I’d give Pierrot’s original sentences the edge over yours in each instance. I was given momentary pause on seeing that Strunk and White apparently agreed with you, but the cite offered evidence that Strunk stunk and White was hardly whiter than. If you’d been posting a matter of opinion as to the clarity of the sentences I doubt I should have been much disposed to argue, but as a matter of technical definition in a field I thought was your specialist subject, I was little short of gobsmacked. At that point, my “Someone is wrong on the Internet” circuit kicked in, and the rest is history.
And a Merry Christmas to you. 
Far be it from me to defend Strunk and White, but–okay, I will. The article Twickster cited missed badly the point of their book, which was called “The Elements of Style” not “How you MUST write und der first vun to disobey, line dem up against der vall und commerce mit der shooting”–it’s a style guide, and White was very stylish in hs prose. (Don’t know how Strunk wrote, and neither does anyone else.) When he said “Omit needless words,” he was advising verbose neophytes, not laying down dictates to William Faulkner (though sometimes, that might have been a good idea…) His cautioning against passive voice, however misconstrued as his concept of the passive might have been, was similarly a caution against flabbiness, vagueness, and verbosity. My field, as far I have one, is “writing,” not grammar, and I use Strunk and White’s principles of clear writing all the time in the most practical senses of the word–amateur writers want to drop in all sorts of outlandish verbose constructions, and S. and W. serve as barriers, shorthand reminders, if you will, to their inclinations. “Oh, S. and W. say not to do this or that or this,” eventuallly gets internalized, and inept writers eventually reach the heights of mediocrity, and stop doing 5 of the top 100 inept things that make their writing literally unreadable. That passes for progress in my field. To dump on them because they’re not experts in grammar is to miss the point.
There are all sorts of ways that sentences get flabby, including a strict grammarian’s understanding of “the passive voice.” That S. and W. fold in some other lazy traits to their understanding of the passive voice (as did I) doesn’t begin to make those contructions attractive, readable, lively prose. Beyond a point, I’ll cheerfully defer to my betters on issues of what’s “grammatical”–“should” and “shall” and “will” continue to puzzle me, though I use them all the time. Let’s stay focused on the OP here, shall we? I’m still trying to figure out if his four sentences were examples of excellence, or ironic renderings of verbose writings, or a mix-and-match of both.
Funny story, I’ve actually been itching to write something in second person present, full of passive voice, the context being that the “you” character is in a Kafka-style despair-inducing helpless situation, and the verbal construction of the sentences would enhance that…in theory.
I’ve worked in the environmental industry for a little over 20 years now. Clients include DoD, EPA, various oil companies, state environmental agencies etc. In most cases, it is a REQUIREMENT that the passive voice be used in reporting. We’re not allowed to write “Mike collected samples at X location,” instead it’s “10 samples were collected at X location” (or whatever the case may be).
The reasoning for this is that often the people doing the actual work and writing the reports are doing it FOR a client, who is then going to claim status as the “preparer” of that tech memo or report, and the company who did the actual work isn’t supposed to have their names “all over the work” as it were, it’s supposed to be very plain vanilla in a manner of speaking.
Usually, if it’s written in a typical environmental tech memo or report, all of that information is listed in its proper section. The contractor that conducted the study will be on the title page under the “prepared by” section. The agency for which the study was conducted will also be on that page or in the Executive Summary, or in which ever section that information is usually found. The festering bogslime location is likely in Section 1.0 Site Background and History…etc etc. The contractors and subcontractors are listed in section 5.0 Contractors and 5.1 Subcontractors.
Relationships and responsibilities are outlined on Figure 1-2 Org Chart and so on. Otherwise it looks sloppy and like an afternoon tea party to keep on going "and then, John from xyz company said “take 5 slime samples” and THEN Sue packed the respirators, and THEN, …and then! It’s a technical report, not a society page.
At school we were told by the Chemistry master that use of the passive voice was an absolute requirement for writing reports, and anyone would didn’t/wouldn’t use it would been marked down severely.