[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."