In general, 2 good principles are:
1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
Orwell talked about where the passive voice is most dangerous/bad. It mainly comes down to thoughtlessness or insincerity. The passive voice removes or hides the actor, so it's useful for people trying to cloak their beliefs or hide assumptions.
"Politics and the English Language" is a great read, as is the book "Style."
Since you bring up "Politics and the English Language", I'll pull up some "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive":
> This is not a statistical quirk. Orwell’s writing features significantly more passives than typical prose. By one count, on average in typical prose about 13% of the transitive verbs are in the passive, whereas in Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English language’ it is 20% (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, p. 720, citing Bryant 1962). My own counts, adhering strictly to the definitions of Huddleston & Pullum et al. (2002), are somewhat higher (probably because I include passive participles used as modifiers rather than complements, which for some reason many grammarians miss), but the ratio is unchanged: by my count, about 17% of the transitive verbs in random prose are likely to be passive, while a careful count of the whole of Orwell’s essay shows that 26% are passive. By either count, then, Orwell uses more than one and a half times as many passives as typical writers.
That is, "egregious" used to mean—even as recent as in Orwell's time—"blatant, obvious, unconcealed, glaring". But apparently all such words also gain a secondary shade of meaning "bad" and come to mean "baltantly, openly bad, and proud of it".
All the more reasons to use smaller, shorter words.
> 2 good principles are:
> 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
> 2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
> The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
This is true, but another major use of passive voice is to put the punch of the sentence at the beginning. Where you want the punch is a stylistic choice; it's not always best at the end. And passive voice doesn't guarantee anything about where the punch will go -- that depends on which phrases hold the punch.
Phrasing a sentence in passive voice lets you present the pieces in a different order and changes which pieces are required vs. optional. Those are important and useful things to be able to do, but if we always wanted to do them the same way, we wouldn't need multiple options.
I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.
I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.
[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."
"it is a truth universally acknowledged" -> impersonal construction
"a single man... must be in want of a wife" -> this is active voice, man is still the subject of the sentence and be is the the only verb. "Want" is a noun. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/want, definition 14.
There is no finite passive verb, but "acknowledged" is a passive form in the sentence in question. It's just a participle rather than a finite verb.
I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)
It's completely true that the advice not to use passives is spurious. That advice is an American cultural phenomenon in the same way that advice not to sleep in a room with a running electric fan is a Korean cultural phenomenon, and it's just as valid.
But it's kind of difficult to simultaneously make the arguments that (1) You don't know what you're saying; you can't even tell whether a verb is passive or not, and (2) OK, this verb is passive and I didn't notice, but that shouldn't take anything away from my arguments.
I'd prefer to see the case for passive usage made based on the actual purpose the passive serves (letting you rearrange the elements of the sentence, so that the order in which they are presented better suits the overall flow of the discourse) than based on gotchas.
This week has been busy and stressful and I wrote both comments quickly and off the cuff. It's not that I can't tell that acknowledged is a passive participle, it's just that I didn't even look at it because I was pattern matching against common mistakes I've seen people make. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the parent comment specifically pointed to the word "acknowledged."
> I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)
This is not what I'm saying, and it's not the argument I would make if I were actually making an argument. I said very few words, and not very carefully chosen ones, and you're putting words into my mouth. I made no case for or against passive voice. I just thought I saw a mistake briefly and I was trying to point it out.
While it doesn't have the same punch (possibly because just lacking the familiarity), what spoils the joke about "Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"?
EDIT: mrob points out elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604262), there regarding the use of 'all', that words like 'everyone' may imply literally every single person in a way that 'universally' doesn't; but then this may easily be dealt with by a constrution like "The mass of humanity acknowledges …" or "Civilised society acknowledges …".
Not quite, the original is very explicit about who acknowledges the truth in question.
What do you think is the difference between "it is a truth universally acknowledged" and "it is a truth acknowledged by all"?