[mrob]

The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice relies on passive voice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

[ellius]

This is a great example of where to use the passive voice. Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end.

In general, 2 good principles are:

1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.

2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.

The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.

Orwell talked about where the passive voice is most dangerous/bad. It mainly comes down to thoughtlessness or insincerity. The passive voice removes or hides the actor, so it's useful for people trying to cloak their beliefs or hide assumptions.

"Politics and the English Language" is a great read, as is the book "Style."

[naniwaduni]

Orwell also had no fucking idea what he was talking about and couldn't identify a passive to make a point about it.

Since you bring up "Politics and the English Language", I'll pull up some "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive":

> This is not a statistical quirk. Orwell’s writing features significantly more passives than typical prose. By one count, on average in typical prose about 13% of the transitive verbs are in the passive, whereas in Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English language’ it is 20% (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, p. 720, citing Bryant 1962). My own counts, adhering strictly to the definitions of Huddleston & Pullum et al. (2002), are somewhat higher (probably because I include passive participles used as modifiers rather than complements, which for some reason many grammarians miss), but the ratio is unchanged: by my count, about 17% of the transitive verbs in random prose are likely to be passive, while a careful count of the whole of Orwell’s essay shows that 26% are passive. By either count, then, Orwell uses more than one and a half times as many passives as typical writers.

[ellius]

He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary complaints, especially his egregious examples of academic and political writing, were right on the money.

[Joker_vD]

And to quote from that very essay, "Professor Hogben... while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means".

That is, "egregious" used to mean—even as recent as in Orwell's time—"blatant, obvious, unconcealed, glaring". But apparently all such words also gain a secondary shade of meaning "bad" and come to mean "baltantly, openly bad, and proud of it".

All the more reasons to use smaller, shorter words.

[naniwaduni]

The trouble is not that he incidentally commits them. He simply has no idea what they are.

[thaumasiotes]

> Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end.

> 2 good principles are:

> 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.

> 2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.

> The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.

This is true, but another major use of passive voice is to put the punch of the sentence at the beginning. Where you want the punch is a stylistic choice; it's not always best at the end. And passive voice doesn't guarantee anything about where the punch will go -- that depends on which phrases hold the punch.

Phrasing a sentence in passive voice lets you present the pieces in a different order and changes which pieces are required vs. optional. Those are important and useful things to be able to do, but if we always wanted to do them the same way, we wouldn't need multiple options.

[ellius]

You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.

[thaumasiotes]

By the way, while the "punch" of a sentence is often placed either first or last for stylistic reasons, and both are fine, there is another kind of phrase for which final position is strongly preferred.

I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.

I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.

[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."

[potatoyogurt]

While I agree with the general point that basic and direct sentence structure is not always the right choice, there is no passive voice in the sentence you quoted.

"it is a truth universally acknowledged" -> impersonal construction

"a single man... must be in want of a wife" -> this is active voice, man is still the subject of the sentence and be is the the only verb. "Want" is a noun. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/want, definition 14.

[thaumasiotes]

> there is no passive voice in the sentence you quoted

There is no finite passive verb, but "acknowledged" is a passive form in the sentence in question. It's just a participle rather than a finite verb.

[potatoyogurt]

okay, you're right, i wasn't paying attention. shame on me. Still, I think it is a stretch to point to the use of this passive participle as the reason why this sentence works or doesn't work.

[thaumasiotes]

> okay, you're right, i wasn't paying attention. shame on me.

I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)

It's completely true that the advice not to use passives is spurious. That advice is an American cultural phenomenon in the same way that advice not to sleep in a room with a running electric fan is a Korean cultural phenomenon, and it's just as valid.

But it's kind of difficult to simultaneously make the arguments that (1) You don't know what you're saying; you can't even tell whether a verb is passive or not, and (2) OK, this verb is passive and I didn't notice, but that shouldn't take anything away from my arguments.

I'd prefer to see the case for passive usage made based on the actual purpose the passive serves (letting you rearrange the elements of the sentence, so that the order in which they are presented better suits the overall flow of the discourse) than based on gotchas.

[potatoyogurt]

I think maybe you're getting the wrong impression about the tone I intend (my fault, I am not putting a lot of effort into tone or careful writing). I realize that what I wrote can be read very passive aggressively. I meant it more just as acknowledging that I made a dumb mistake and chiding myself for it. In person, that would have been clearer.

This week has been busy and stressful and I wrote both comments quickly and off the cuff. It's not that I can't tell that acknowledged is a passive participle, it's just that I didn't even look at it because I was pattern matching against common mistakes I've seen people make. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the parent comment specifically pointed to the word "acknowledged."

> I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)

This is not what I'm saying, and it's not the argument I would make if I were actually making an argument. I said very few words, and not very carefully chosen ones, and you're putting words into my mouth. I made no case for or against passive voice. I just thought I saw a mistake briefly and I was trying to point it out.

[JadeNB]

> The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice relies on passive voice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

While it doesn't have the same punch (possibly because just lacking the familiarity), what spoils the joke about "Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"?

EDIT: mrob points out elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604262), there regarding the use of 'all', that words like 'everyone' may imply literally every single person in a way that 'universally' doesn't; but then this may easily be dealt with by a constrution like "The mass of humanity acknowledges …" or "Civilised society acknowledges …".

[thaumasiotes]

> If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

Not quite, the original is very explicit about who acknowledges the truth in question.

What do you think is the difference between "it is a truth universally acknowledged" and "it is a truth acknowledged by all"?

[mrob]

If you find a single counterexample then "acknowledged by all" fails. "Universally acknowledged" is more vague, so you can claim you meant universally acknowledged only within a certain group of people. The source of the vagueness is the use of the passive form. The sentence is funny because the narrator is exploiting this vagueness in a self-serving way.