[scudd]

This reminds of the technical writing education I received in college. While I understand the goal of this guidance is to make technical communication as clear and concise as possible, I also feel like it leads to a world of boring writers. And (IMO) boring communication actually should be recognized as worse communication, in comparison to communication that combines technical detail with human deliverance.

The problem is all the more exacerbated when the guidance uses a checklist-like rubric such as:

-"this sentence exceeds X word count, consider splitting"

-"this sentence uses passive voice, use active voice".

I remember "revising" parts of my senior design to score higher against a similar rubric, despite being confident that the revision was overall worse.

Writing quality is inherently subjective, maybe to the chagrin of engineering types. Even though there are horrendous emails and documentation in the wild, I still think teaching people how to write with tools like this isn't the solution.

[ksdale]

When I was a child learning to write, so many of these rules bothered me so much. I'd get notes like that on my papers, and I'd think, "Yeah, but my way sounds better..." But so often that point is met with a blank stare, as if how the writing comes out doesn't matter at all compared to whether the "rules" were followed.

I'm sure a lot of it was me just being a headstrong young person, but I also know that according to grades, I was much better at writing than most of my peers, and I also continually felt like I was writing worse than I could have been, in order to satisfy teachers.

[aidenn0]

The goal of all writing classes is to make the grader happy. For a good writing class, making the grader happy and writing well are in close alignment. For the overwhelming majority of writing classes the two are mostly orthogonal.

The above paragraph is obvious to many, but wasn't to me as I'm not great at picking up on social cues. What finally made it click was comparing grades with a friend for an assignment that had a rubric. Each category could get a "+" a "" or a "-" (in descending order of "goodness"). My friends marks were strictly worse than mine, he got a B, I got a D.

Usually it's less blatant than this, but this particular teacher had it in for me (though not without cause).

[jlos]

The passive voice one is a common misunderstanding. Passive voice isn't bad but it's primary purpose is to allow flexibility in word order.

A good rule of thumb is to have something familiar at the beginning of a sentence and something new at the end of a sentence. Further, to create flow what was the new part in the previous sentence should become the familiar part in the current sentence. Subject verb object pattern in the active voice often requires the object performing the action of the verb to be at the beginning of the sentence . This is often not desirable if that object is indeed the new thing you want to introduce at the end of a sentence.

[poutrathor]

In French, passive voice is used to redirect the spotlight on meaningful bits.

In their example & imho, "Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice." communicates their intent better than "We marked in green phrase using passive voice". The 'we' is useless.

[treis]

You can replace "have been" with are in these sorts of cases. So "Phrases in green are marked to show passive voice." Or even shorter "Phrases in green use passive voice".

[porb121]

You've perfectly demonstrated the problem with these kinds of revisions. "Phrases in green use passive voice" removes the passive voice, and in doing so, completely alters the semantic content of the sentence. The passive voice expressed a meaningfully different notion.

[Igelau]

> Phrases in green are marked to show passive voice.

That's still flagged as passive voice by this abomination of an editor.

> Phrases in green use passive voice.

The meaning of that is less clear than the original. The phrase isn't using anything. We are talking about how it was written: facts about its construction that happened to it. The only way we can do that honestly and concisely is with passive voice because the phrase is only passively involved.

Rules like these are toxic nonsense.

[dragonwriter]

> In French, passive voice is used to redirect the spotlight on meaningful bits.

True in English, too.

It's a common bad-writing problem in English that it is frequently used improperly so that it obscures meaningful bits while being excessively verbose. Thus, common neophyte advice is “avoid passive voice”, and some people get super religious about this without understanding what problem the advice aina to solve.

[systemvoltage]

I think both are worse than: "To show passive voice, phrases are marked in green."

[rrose]

that is definitely worse than either of the other examples. your version doesn't specify which phrases are marked in green.

[systemvoltage]

You're right. I see the problem :) It is subtle, but nice catch.

[jasode]

>Passive voice isn't bad but it's primary purpose is to allow flexibility in word order.

Maybe we're reading different things but from everything a I see, passive voice is way overused. Most writers are not deliberately sequencing their word order in the sentences which results in passive voice. Instead, most writers are omitting the active agent because it's the easier default. Unfortunately, this overuse of passive voice lacks punch.

Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made."

Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. With no explicit agent, there's nobody in specific to point blame at nor offend. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes."

There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. We lost money on that.") I just checked the BH's most recent 2020 10-K and Warren Buffet still writes in active voice.

(I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)

For technical reports like "post-mortem of website outages"... the heavy use of passive voice is understandable since it's just trying to explain the problem and eventual solution and not focus on _who_ fat-fingered the command-line with incorrect config to cause the outage.

[Igelau]

> trying to explain the problem and eventual solution and not focus on _who_ fat-fingered the command-line with incorrect config to cause the outage.

Yes! It's important for the newspapers to hold Nixon accountable. The rest of us have stuff do so we can afford to buy papers that tell us whose fault that is.

[jlos]

I would agree it's overused and often a sign the writer lacks clarity into what they are trying to communicate (aside from the more nefarious uses to obfuscate).

But I think it helps to understand it's purpose instead of to say it's just bad.

[Veen]

> Mistakes were made

You can be just as evasive in the active voice. Someone made a mistake. An error caused the deletion of your data.

Most uses of the passive have nothing to do with being evasive.

[jasode]

>You can be just as evasive in the active voice. Someone made a mistake.

Yes, but by explicitly adding the word "someone [...]", the hiding/concealment is calling attention to itself. It's an unusual and awkward construction of a sentence -- or -- the writer was trying to write a mystery/crime novel.

On the other hand, if the writer doesn't want to name the agent without drawing attention to the writing style, the overuse of passive "to be" verbs instead of active verbs is the way to do it. Passive voice is the hallmark of government bureaucratic reports and they're boring and lack punch.

>Most uses of the passive have nothing to do with being evasive.

I agree.

[jcims]

I think we see passive voice a lot in technology because we're frequently describing actions and outcomes. The actors are either irrelevant or continuous and unambiguously implied.

In the example we'd have to keep referring to 'Hemingway' or 'the application' in order to maintain active voice, which adds no value. E.g. 'Hemingway marks phrases green to show passive voice'

Passive voice allows us to switch focus to the object that is being acted upon, which is much more relevant.

[Veen]

Yes, the passive voice is an information packaging construction. There are several others: existential clauses, it-cleft constructions, preposing and postposing, etc. It's just one of the many ways we can adjust the construction of English clauses to suit our purposes.

[beachy]

Sounds fascinating, I'd love to see some examples.

[jl6]

A common pitfall when trying to humanise technical content (particularly error messages) is to add folksy cutesy whimsical flourishes which are cute and funny and whatever to some of your audience, but might be a barrier to others (particular those who do not share your cultural background or have English as a second language).

[sidpatil]

I think it's part of a larger trend of infantilization of the end user, which I find disturbing.

[sokoloff]

What is a better solution? For business writing, just consistently considering the active voice would improve many writers’ output.

“It was decided that we’d lower shipping prices.” versus “Chris decided to lower our shipping prices.”

I don’t know if writers choose the former because it feels fancier, because they notice other writers doing it (maybe because they struggled to read what was written and took notice of the pattern?), or because they don’t know or don’t want to commit to what actually happened, but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.

[wenc]

In your example, the primary difference for me wasn't so much active-vs-passive, but attribution. I've seen the passive voice used to great effect for softening statements and avoiding the assignment of blame/other undesirable attribute.

Instead of "Chris and Jack disagreed during the discussion", one could say "No agreement was reached during the discussion". One may say this is mealy-mouthed, but it seems to me that managing emotions is a supremely important part of being a good communicator and being a consensus-builder. Avoiding the use of language that triggers "fight-or-flight" responses is very useful in many situations.

[stiglitz]

Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus. The choice between active and passive voice should be based on this choice of focus. You can’t say categorically that the active voice is better than passive, classical rule of thumb notwithstanding.

[Uehreka]

Yeah, but to people who see what you’re doing, it’s clear that you’re dodging responsibility. Like, focusing on the action is preferable because it takes emphasis off the doer. I prefer that folks just say “we did the thing” instead of saying “the thing was done”. We know who did it, trying to shade that fact away with grammar just looks suspicious.

[throwaway1777]

Go for it. Meanwhile those of who like having clients will avoid directly blaming them.

[whatshisface]

>Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus.

Behold, the most important thing to know about business writing:

>Chris broke the build.

>The build was broken.

[Garlef]

"The team decided to let chris break the build." ;)

[groby_b]

Still to finger-pointy. Try "a build breakage occurred".

[whatshisface]

"The set of broken expanded to include the build."

[cbozeman]

Jesus.

We Chrises can never get a break... unless its the build. -_-

[scudd]

For the simplest of communications, like an IM or short email, maybe using checklist rules does impart more good than bad.

But I think in larger writing pieces, including those technical in nature, these rules produce low quality writing. In my experience it produces extremely curt, choppy writing with overall bad flow. It almost feels like a bulleted list converted to a paragraph, with a sprinklings of "and"s, "so"s and "because"s. And while "flow" sounds like a wishy-washy concept, I think it is effectual and worthy of first level consideration. It shapes how well your ideas synthesize together, and ultimately how well you communicate your thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

[vagrantJin]

> but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.

Tolstoy's War and Peace would frustrate you to insanity in that case.

[zorked]

This "rule" against passive voice doesn't exist in every language.

What looks like good writing in English may look like childish, repetitive prose in other languages.

[wolki]

The "rule" doesn't exist in English either.

Most of the people complaining about the passive have either serious trouble identifying a passive at all, or can't construct an argument why it's bad to save their lives, as amply demonstrated by Geoffrey Pullum. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf Section 2 is a bit technical, but the rest is a great read.

[crooked-v]

The former allows hiding or diverting blame for an action, which is part of why it's so popular with corporations and law enforcement.

[munro]

> This reminds of the technical writing education I received in college. While I understand the goal of this guidance is to make technical communication as clear and concise as possible, I also feel like it leads to a world of boring writers. And (IMO) boring communication actually should be recognized as worse communication, in comparison to communication that combines technical detail with human deliverance.

The site says this sentence is very hard to read, and I will get lost trying to follow your meandering. :)

I totally agree, I disabled all predictive text. The feature in Gmail is the worst. It's like, no thanks Google, I don't need you to tell me what I'm going to say, or how to say it.

[jkingsbery]

90% of the time when I give feedback reviewing other people's work that they use passive, it's not using about active for the sake of active. It's that in choosing to use the passive, the writer leaves ambiguous who is performing an action.

[turnerdhooch]

Depends on if you prefer a longer time to launch using training wheels or a shorter time to launch by crashing and burning repeatedly.

Given the low resilience of most people, training wheels is going to win out, and the beauty of it is that they are removable.

[tomc1985]

To be fair, active voice makes a huge difference over passive voice. It's good to avoid passive voice in all of one's writing.

And the LAST thing I want to see is people reverting back to the obnoxiously wordy and flowery styles of writing that were common a hundred years ago+