Re: preferred voices?

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

>In English the reason I've often seen (and the reason I avoid it much of
>the time) is that the passive often obscures responsibility.  For
>example, a company might say something like: "Two employees have been
>killed and the matter is under investigation"; there are a lot of ways to
>use the passive voice to misdirect the reader/listener.  (Probably a book
>on rhetoric or style could give real-life examples.)  Which isn't to say
>that the passive voice isn't useful and even preferred in other
>constructions, e.g. when you don't *know* who/what was responsible, or in
>other stylistic situations.  I used to turn semantic somersaults avoiding
>the passive before I came to the latter realization.
There is another use for passives, which isn't so important in English.  In
a conversation or paper, passives allow you to keep the subject the same
across sentences, adding coherence to what is being said.  Japanese uses
passives for this quite a bit.

>Another reason you might not see it, at least as far as college writing
>classes are concerned :-/ is that some professors will actively dock
>points for *any* passive construction even when it is stylistically and
>grammatically justified, which I feel is stupid, but as a writing tutor I
>have no control over what the professors do.
Linguistics professors don't mind passives.  They are very open minded
about stylistics, I find.  Which is good, because I've always been one to
let my sense of style guide my writing, ignoring whatever I may have been
told by English prof's.

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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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