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

[Alan Mackenzie]

> For technical writing, I favor active voice where appropriate, but in
> some cases I think passive voice is preferable. Consider, for example,
> "The parameters were perturbed, and the test was run again." I could
> rewrite that in active voice as "We varied the parameters and ran the
> test again." But what if there is no "we", only "I"? Then I would have
> to write "I varied the parameters and ran the test again." That just
> doesn't strike me as good style for a technical paper. The point is not
> who did it but that it was done. What difference would it make if a
> monkey did it, as long as he did it right?

Maybe the parameters might be less perturbed at being varied by a monkey
than by your good self.  Who knows?

> Russ P.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
;-)