Shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My advisor rewrote himself in bash."

Also, having seen Matt Might give a talk on a day's notice when he was still a grad student, I think his students are in good hands.

Regarding the passive voice, the author is just providing general clues to good writing and is not imposing a dogma. Certainly the passive voice makes for a boring read.

So I think that his point is: get rid of adverbs for clarity, and change the passive voice to an active one to maintain interest.

I must say I agree.

I have no problem with a house style, but the claim that following one particular stylebook makes one a "better writer" annoy me. Worse, the linked article claims that "the elision of all adverbs from any technical writing," and "the removal of the passive voice," "constitute a net positive."

Good writing, technical or otherwise, requires adverbs. Notwithstanding the claims of a variety of self-proclaimed experts, no good writer will omit adverbs, and no writer can successfully omit all adverbs without sounding incredibly choppy and awkward. The author of the linked article included a few; counting those adverbs that end in "-ly," I found ten (fortunately mechanically really genuinely personally frequently unfortunately solely rightfully technically), and in the sentence condemning adverbs he included an adverb ("so").

As for the passive, the author acknowledges the difficulty of avoiding them, but claims that their removal still improves writing, though without explaining why. In fact, it makes the writing seem rather choppy (as if the author had to spend too much time paralysed by a set of rules to follow and had none left to make the text flow). And despite putting in a great deal of effort to avoid them, the author still included two or more that I found in a quick reread: "drawn for them" in the "beholder words" section, and "accepted for publication" at the bottom. In both cases, I find the result perfectly readable, not at all fuzzy, and entirely unremarkable--which shoots a rather gaping hole in the argument against the passive voice.

I feel sorry for his grad students, and hope that when they come out the other end, they discard the silly mandates of their advisor, rather than perpetuating the myths....

Most of the time, my students use these constructs without thinking about it. That's the real problem.

Perhaps I should have posted a few paragraphs from a recent draft to highlight what I meant by inappropriate (or excessive) use, but I don't think my grad students would appreciate a public shaming.

As I mentioned in the article, there are times when the passive voice and adverbs have their uses.

It would be a net positive if my grad students removed all their adverbs and all passive voice from their recent drafts.

(Of course, the optimum would be to leave only the appropriate uses of these constructs.)

I'm willing to bet this is true for a lot of new grad students in science or engineering first learning how to do scientific writing.

It was certainly true for me once upon a time.

Having the scripts highlight these constructs forces students to ask the question, "Is there a way I can say this better?"

If the answer really is "No," then they can leave it in.

But, I want them to think about it.

/article author

Thanks for it though, great tool.

One of the things I hate most about English (and this is by no means a rant on how stoopid English is) is that "that that" can be grammatically correct. It's a minor thing really, but I could swear it's mocking me some days.

There's a modifier missing in "equal ability" to make that sentence logical. Writing is an ability itself.

The really interesting thing is _how_ much they are willing to compromise; would they prefer a mediocre programmer with flair for writing? If not, it is just meaningless platitudes.