This article validates my 25 year argument with writing teachers.
I know, it sounds ludicrous. But it's true. I have been arguing about this sticky subject for as long as I can remember. In EVERY class, from the beginning of my education to even now in law school, I was always told that Passive Voice is a no-no. It was said to be bad writing, and anyone who used it was clearly deficient in writing ability.
However, it never made sense to me. There simply had to be a reason for it, otherwise why would anyone have done it? Passive Voice had to be good for something. I thought it was a conspiracy, The Man keeping me down, whatever you want to call it.
Honestly, I wondered what the deal was. Why is Passive Voice so bad? Granted, if it is used in an way that is against its purpose, it's bad. But really, Active Voice can be bad also, if you follow that argument. Anyway, I thought about it, and I came up with my own reasons why Passive Voice was not all that bad. I even vowed to fight the system, when I become a professor, to tell people why Passive Voice wasn't going to condemn them to the 3rd circle of hell or anything.
But before I could fight the good fight, this nice article came out. It is a sign that I am right. Again. Read it and rejoice in the rightness that is me. And the author.
Ps - thanks go to my nobbit for finding this.
PPs - Jason needs to post again.
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4 comments:
After some difficulty on the first attempt, your linked article now opened in my browser. I think perhaps you need a pocket sized copy of the article to keep with you always, because apparently, you yourself have not put forth a convincing argument up to this time regarding your own use of the passive voice.
...and I thought you were studying that sort of thing. pshaww.
Thanks for the read.
I guess growing up I did not have too much stress on this subject. I had a great many English teachers that focused on the meaning of the words and the best way to convey that meaning and less on gramatical no no's.
Though I did have one teacher who attempted to 'teach us to write poetry' which I am of the school that one can't grade poetry its personal and has no laws (I like e e cummings and other odd poets especially) and she sucked at it. We all had to read a poem aloud and a friend of mine read the best poem in the class (as was the general consensus) and she gave it a 75%.
But this lack of focus on 'proper grammer' is also how I can write, but do not know what a verb orarticle etc is. I can't tell you gramatical rules but I can look at a sentence and tell when its wrong all by how it sounds. ::shrug:: A different way of learning
On a side-note, we had an English teacher in high school that felt something like this about passive voice--that the only "evil passive voice" is passive voice when you don't know what you're doing with it...
Unfortunately, all military writing happens in the active voice, becuase people get confused if your sentences aren't all "subject-object-verb"... with the smallest words possible.
Ask me someday, and maybe I'll go into more detail. There's a book the military puts out called "Tongue and Quill" which is the de facto standard for proper communication. I can rant about that for days.
I can't edit my post -- so, here's Tongue and Quill
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