RE: Sentense construction

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Oh, no, here we go with passive and active sentences again...

I'm hoping against hope that Lauren's posting simply reversed the
numbers when she started discussing "active" vs. "passive", because
from a grammatical point of view the fist example is passive voice
(some points are listed by an implied actor [the writer]) and the
second one is active voice ("we" discussed some points).
Or maybe this is another issue of the infamous "neutral stance"?
Or another case of the "semantic" voice where "active" voice
(with quotes) actually signifies the grammatical passive voice
and "passive" (with quotes) actually means active?

And as far as lists go, *I* was always taught to avoid writing bullets
that are a continuation and completion of a fragmentary stem
sentence because that form requires more effort to read (you
have to keep re-reading the stem--mentally if not physically--to
properly parse each bullet item). And even if I were to use that
form of list, it is the one case where I would tend to *not* use
a colon at the end of the stem because there's no need for
major stop punctuation in the middle of a sentence.

-Fred Ridder