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

[Russ P.]

On Oct 3, 4:14 am, Uday Reddy <uDOTsDOTre...@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 10/3/2010 4:06 AM, Xah Lee wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Gosh, for a while there, I thought Emacs had begun to complain about passive 
> voice.  Heaven forbid!
>
>
>
>
>
> >      * 〈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: ...
>
> Pretty damning — or it would be if Strunk and White had actually claimed any 
> of those were passive constructions. They don’t. Here’s how they introduce 
> these examples: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be 
> made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for 
> some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.” (My link is 
> to the online text of the Strunk-only 1918 edition, but the passage is 
> unchanged in later editions.)
>
> Now, Strunk and White themselves use the passive voice in that sentence, so 
> one might say they are violating their own rules (though they’re not — they 
> don’t say the passive may never be used, only that active constructions tend 
> to be more forceful). But they don’t claim that their examples are all in the 
> passive voice. Excessive deployment of the passive is only one of the 
> weaknesses they discuss in this section. Their point is not only to urge the 
> use of the active voice but to encourage the use of “active” transitive verbs 
> rather than limp declarations of being. It’s sound advice: “dead leaves 
> covered the ground” really is more forceful and better than “there were a 
> great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.”
>
> One can fairly complain that Strunk and White perceive the threat to good 
> style as coming from only one direction. Consider their next section, in 
> which they command, “Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, 
> hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or 
> in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.” “Denial,” “evasion,” “colorless” 
> — these are tendentious terms. Someone who takes the authors’ advice too 
> literally will always write fortissimo, without any understanding of the uses 
> and virtues of the pianissimo. Irony, impartiality, subtlety, and negation do 
> have a place in good writing. And bad prose can be Stentorian just as it can 
> be anodyne, though admittedly most writers, especially in academia, err on 
> the mushy side.
>
>    --  The Elements of Bad Style?
>        Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy    
>        http://www.amconmag.com/mccarthy/2009/04/26/the-elements-of-bad-style/
>
> I have no idea why the linguists have begun to stab each other.  But it looks 
> like a good idea for Computer Scientists to stay out of it.
>
> Cheers,
> Uday

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?

Russ P.