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Personally, I find the modern fashion of sneering at Passive Voice to be wrong-headed. Writers need to make full use of the grammatical structures available to them according to the needs of the situation. To impose a blanket ban on it just seems unnecessarily and pointlessly prescriptive.
On 21 Oct 2012, at 08:15, jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com wrote:
> I suspect academics favour the passive because they are often describing complex actions without specific agents. That makes it inappropriate to name a subject explicitly.
>
> The other reason to use the passive is when the verb takes the 'weight' of the meaning rather than the subject or object. English constructions typically put the semantic 'load' to the end, and the passive lets the writer put the verb in that position.
>
> As for organizational pressures, I must be terribly lucky to have never experienced something similar. Am I a fluke, or are most technical writers really given so little discretion and ownership of their work?
>
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