this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (22 children)

Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (21 children)

Wait what, TIL there was/is a crusade against... the passive fucking voice?

Some people just need to invent problems for their life to feel meaningful, don't they

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (17 children)

@V0ldek This is a hill I will die on: the passive voice ABSOLUTELY does not belong in a work of fiction. (Academic papers and reports are another matter entirely, but fiction: no.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there's fat chance it's universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.

Like I can't imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that "Someone trapped this chest!" instead of the 100% more natural "This chest was trapped!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

@V0ldek That's an RPG protagonist protagging. Not prose fiction. (This thought brought to you b/c I've lately been reading a multivolume LitRPG epic that I had to bail on midway through book 3 because the author dropped into passive voice with extreme clunkiness at random, infrequent intervals, making for a jarring read.)

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