Why do you avoid passive voice?

[akam chinjir]

Anyone have an idea if there are comparable dicta in other rhetorical traditions? (I seem to recall an awful lot of passives from my dalliance with Sanskrit.)

Favourite somewhat related example, though middly rather than passive: a guide at the National Palace Museum in Taipei mentioning the time (but not the circumstances!) when the museum's collection came from the mainland.

[zompist]

Zompist: on business English, I think all you're pointing out there is that these writers are shit. Or more precisely, there's a big gulf between what they say they want, and what they tend to actually produce.

Yeah, they tend not be good writers. Not many people are; neither a beautiful nor a simple style is easy to write.

But as I pointed out, the purpose of such prose is not to be manly, not to be simple, but to lull investors. You do this by being and sounding conventional, by mentioning the things people expect to be mentioned, by giving the impression that you have a plan without actually giving any details. Of course, advice for writers almost never spills the beans-- you never get told "write as badly as everyone else" even if that's the lesson you're really supposed to learn.

As for Austen, surely you recognize that she is purposely having them talk that way, and she knows very well it's not the everyday intimacy of Mr and Mrs Bennett? She, and her characters, have recourse to higher registers of style, the sort that Samuel Johnson was writing in her youth. Even at the time it could be perceived as pompous (Goldsmith once said that if Johnson wrote a conversation for little fishes, they would sound like great whales), but it was supposed to be elegant and epigrammatic. She might have been trying for delightful, but I think she'd be vexed to be found baroque!

[zompist]

Anyone have an idea if there are comparable dicta in other rhetorical traditions? (I seem to recall an awful lot of passives from my dalliance with Sanskrit.)

I know just enough about Sanskrit to know that its rhetoric was crazy. A raft of synonyms; puns and wordplay; varying tenses at a whim to fit elaborate meters. Octavio Paz finds it eloquent and passionate, but tedious if taken in great quantities.

In a language where you can move arguments around freely, and the passive is just another verb form, I don't think the arguments against the English passive would have much of a parallel.

French is an interesting case, because e.g. novelists still pretty much write 19th century prose, except perhaps for the dialog. At the same time the French love writing in a way that I don't think English speakers do. One of Claude Levi-Strauss's books reproduces a ten-page passage from his youthful notebooks, a description of a storm. Obviously he was proud that he could write so damn much about that storm. (It's not like it's some really important storm, either; there's no danger, nothing happens, and it means nothing particular in his life.)

[Vijay]

I know just enough about Sanskrit to know that its rhetoric was crazy. A raft of synonyms

A practice we've happily adopted in modern Indian languages, too (regardless of whether they're actually related to Sanskrit or not). I'm not entirely sure our literature would exist without this.

puns and wordplay; varying tenses at a whim

I'm not sure we Indians just in general would exist without any of this! God we love wordplay. Bonus points if it's cross-linguistic. I swear, 75% of what my dad and I say to each other is wordplay, and something like 95% of what he writes to me by hand is wordplay. (Unless of course I'm interpreting "wordplay" way too broadly ).

Oh yeah, and we don't seem to like tenses all that much, either, at least in literature.

[akam chinjir]

And a very quick google tells me that Hindi gets its ergativity from passives. (I wonder if that pattern---passives giving rise to ergativity---seems odder than it really is to some of us who've been shaped by Strunk&Whitey rhetorical traditions.)

[circeus]

French is an interesting case, because e.g. novelists still pretty much write 19th century prose, except perhaps for the dialog. At the same time the French love writing in a way that I don't think English speakers do. One of Claude Levi-Strauss's books reproduces a ten-page passage from his youthful notebooks, a description of a storm. Obviously he was proud that he could write so damn much about that storm. (It's not like it's some really important storm, either; there's no danger, nothing happens, and it means nothing particular in his life.)

I feel like one of the reason French has less passives is that the passive is more... marked? rhetorically? And as a result it weight more heavily on a sentence. French has more alternatives to it than english, too: the pronoun on (e.g. the 1966 movie On a volé la Joconde, whose English title is, sensibly enough, The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen) or the reflexive factitive. Yes, that's a thing! You wouldn't say "mon équippe a été battue" or "ma voiture a été volée", but you WILL say "mon equipe s'est fait battre" or "je me suis fait voler ma voiture". (Not entirely sure whether that construction happens to be a canadian thing, though.)

[mèþru]

I also liked Animal Farm but didn't like the Old Man and the Sea.

I don't get myself.

[Neon Fox]

I'd take the people who rail against the passive more seriously if more of them could actually recognize it. Having heard someone say, with all apparent seriousness, "In general, the passive voice is to be eschewed," I kind of want to scream "BY ZOMBIES, DAMNIT" at everyone who gets het up about the passive.

This is similar to the side-eye I give people who have an -ly phobia--that is, the ones who declare that adverbs are bad but have no problem with adverbial phrases...

[Linguoboy]

This is similar to the side-eye I give people who have an -ly phobia--that is, the ones who declare that adverbs are bad but have no problem with adverbial phrases...

I was fortunate enough not to have any teachers who gave a good goddamn for Strunk and White so it was late in life before I heard about antiadverbism and I was like, "wayt whut".

I've been more bothered by people who took this a little too much at face value and have a horror of any -ly-less variant of a longstanding adverb.

[alynnidalar]

Regarding Jane Austen's dialogue: y'all, she changes her style depending on the characters speaking. This is a pretty fundamental thing that most writers do. Yes, Mrs. Bennet's dialogue is more straightforward and less intellectual than Darcy's--it's Mrs. Bennet, for heaven's sake. Yes, Darcy and Lizzie trying to out-intellect each other in a futile attempt to pretend they aren't attracted to each other will use more "clever" and complex constructions. If you're going to look at whether or not Austen writes in a "straightforward" or "baroque" manner, you can't look at dialogue, which by necessity will reflect the characters speaking it.

In fact, writing where all dialogue is written in the exact same manner, regardless of character background, situation, etc. is generally considered to be not very good.

[Torco]

If always the passive voice was used, and the active voice was rarely ever used, the thought that this would have implications as to how we describe our grammar occurs to me.

Now I'm wondering if there are natlangs that work like this.

[Xwtek]

If always the passive voice was used, and the active voice was rarely ever used, the thought that this would have implications as to how we describe our grammar occurs to me.

Now I'm wondering if there are natlangs that work like this.

Then you describe it as ergative language with unusual antipassives.

[Vijay]

I've heard probably a few times by now that Latin used to use passive voice a lot more often than active voice.

[mèþru]

I'm pretty sure that passive-heavy nominative-accusative languages still can be easily defined as nominative-accusative

[Curlyjimsam]

What I think (probably most of this has been said already):

(1) There are a limited set of occasions where the passive is best avoided (because e.g. the active is more concise and/or easier to understand, or because it's being used deceptively to disguise the identity of the agent*).

(2) This has led some people, apparently Americans in particular, to overdo things and formulate a general rule about not using the passive wherever you can possibly avoid it. And there may be some measure of the usual prescriptivist habit to jump on particular things almost randomly and develop an irrational hatred of them.

(3) Some people however continue to use the passive because they think it makes them sound more intelligent or important or official or whatever (perhaps because it is found more in more academic speech anyway). [This is like railway announcements saying "Alight at this station" instead of "Get off here"; the less common formulation makes it sound more important.] The people in question may not actually be any as intelligent or important or official as they want to come across.

(4) Austen doesn't use passives in dialogue much because spoken language generally doesn't use passives much (and presumably this was also the case two hundred years ago).

* - although one rather suspects that when people say "The employees were fired" when they have the option of saying "We fired the employees" that that is a deliberate stylistic decision, and telling them not to do it is not going to make them not do it, unless we can successfully incalculate everyone with the belief that all short passives are deceptive and therefore whenever you see one you must automatically distrust its author.

[Xwtek]

I'm pretty sure that passive-heavy nominative-accusative languages still can be easily defined as nominative-accusative

Not if passive is more common than active voice.

[KathTheDragon]

If always the passive voice was used, and the active voice was rarely ever used, the thought that this would have implications as to how we describe our grammar occurs to me.

Now I'm wondering if there are natlangs that work like this.

Then you describe it as ergative language with unusual antipassives.

That's not how antipassives work, since they still decrease valence.

[akam chinjir]

That's not how antipassives work, since they still decrease valence.

It could work, I think. Start with something like this:

Sal[NOM] was-eating[ACTIVE] the-rice[ACC]
by-Sal[INST] was-eaten[PASSIVE] the-rice[NOM]

Reinterpret NOM → ABS, INST → ERG, ACC → OBL, ACTIVE → ANTIPASSIVE, PASSIVE → ACTIVE:

Sal[ABS] was-eating[ANTIPASSIVE] the-rice[OBL]
by-Sal[ERG] was-eaten[ACTIVE] the-rice[ABS]

[KathTheDragon]

Hm, interesting idea.

[JT the Ninja]

Passive voice is often used as a way of avoiding the appearance of placing blame (See! I just did it there!). It's much less confrontational to say "The reports were written incorrectly by whoever set them up" than "Whoever set up these reports wrote them incorrectly!"

I switch between the two more often when I'm choosing what gets the focus of the sentence. That is, if I'm focusing on what's doing the action, sometimes I'll use passive voice to put the agent at the end (perhaps like building suspense, as in "And the winner is..." Conversely, if I want to focus on what got the brunt of the action, I'll use active voice to put the object at the end.

Really, I just use what sounds better to me.