emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?

[Xah Lee]

of interest.

• 〈What's Passive Voice? What's Aggresive Voice?〉
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/active_voice_passive_voice.html

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What's Passive Voice? What's Aggresive Voice?

Xah Lee, 2010-10-02

In writing, you know that there is passive voice and active voice,
right? And the writing style guilds tell us, that we should use active
voice. In the following sentences, can you tell which is active voice
and which is passive voice?

    * (1) At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard.
    * (2) There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the
ground.
    * (3) It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said
what she had.
    * (4) The reason that he left college was that his health became
impaired.

Take 5 min to answer before you read on.

The Language Log recently has a blog asking readers to identify
passive/active voice. (Apparantly, they've been beating this horse for
a while, but i only started to read Language Log last month.) Before i
tackle the question and post my redoubtable comment with implicit
offense at grammarians, i thought to myself: it's been some 17 years
when i read anything technical about passive/active voice in Struck &
White... so let me look into Wikipedia to refresh myself just so i
won't come out a fool.

So, my first stop is at: Passive voice. And WHAM! It is
incomprehensible, and to ME!? To understand the article well, i'll
have to delve into my brain and read it carefully about all the
“subject”, “verb”, “object”, “adjective”, “adverb”, “aux verb”, and
perhaps reacquaint myself with the evil “split infinitives”. Fuck
that. By my mastery of info age, i took the shortcut and went directly
to the article English passive voice instead. The article there is
still a bit dense, but i found the above 4 examples about passive
voice, quoted right from “Strunk & White”, except that 3 of them are
actually active voice! The source of this is from:

    * 〈50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice〉 (2009-04-17) By Geoffrey K
Pullum. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. chronicle.com

Quote:

    The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in
which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from
limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has
not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has
significantly degraded it.

    ...

    What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being
retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they
don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four
pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to
correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.
“At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly
identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all
errors: ...

        * “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the
ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
        * “It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said
what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the
passive construction.
        * “The reason that he left college was that his health became
impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but
that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. “Become” doesn't allow a
following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition
became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)

So here we are.

I pride myself as a good writer (n i'd like to think within top 100 on
this earth), albeit with unique usage and style. (See: The Writing
Style on XahLee.org.) I read “Strunk & White”'s The Elements of Style
in the early 1990s, i think twice, among quite a few other writing
guides and advices. I've seen countless advices for active voice in
the past 20 years, everywhere. For example, here's quote from GNU
Emacs Lisp Reference Manual: Documentation Tips. Quote:

    Write documentation strings in the active voice, not the passive,
and in the present tense, not the future. For instance, use “Return a
list containing A and B.” instead of “A list containing A and B will
be returned.”

Not until today, i realized, just how much i did not understand what
is Active voice and Passive voice, and when you look into this issue,
such as Wikipedia article on it, you see that it is quite technical.
Unless you have a good study of linguistics, you wouldn't understand
it. And of course, the common advices on “active” voice, even from
professional style guides, are just totally clueless.

Today, “passive voice” simply means sentences that do not sound
dynamic or in action. The word “passive” in “passive voice” just mean
the opposite of “aggresive”. So, if a sentence sounds lame, it is
passive voice! And, actually, for pop communication, i think i endorse
this interpretation; screw linguistic history.

Here's one of the article from Language Log about this issue:

    * 〈“Passive Voice” — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.〉 (2009-03-12) By Mark
Liberman. At: Language Log

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PS for those who got it wrong, don't feel bad. Few people on this
earth can get it right, and most of them mob toilets at McDonalds.
Just be happy that we all understand split infinitives, at least.

 Xah ∑ xahlee.org ☄