Passive voice

There is nothing wrong with the passive voice. Some influential books say you should avoid it, but there is no reason to.

The roots of passive avoidance:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003380.html

Interesting site, Alienvoord.

QimWhat's so wrong with the passive voice. Word keeps telling me to revise because I wrote '...even remember when the photo was taken'

help...

I tell students that there are three basic reasons to use the passive voice:

1) We do not know who did the action (A man was shot by

Academic articles tend to be written in the passive voice. This is probably simply an extension of Philip's three reasons. In trying to be objective, there is no need to know who did the action and an experiment should be replicable by anyone - not just "Bob." Contrast;

"The subject was adminstered an injection by the experimenter" and,

"Bob gave Frank an injection."

Terse, vigorous English has its place. But there are times when flabby flaccid obfuscatory English does the job much better.

(Many a career has been saved by timely and extensive use of the passive voice.)

MrP

That's the thing - the passive is not necessarily more flabby, flaccid or obfuscatory than any other voice. More from the same site:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.html