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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

What is a better solution? For business writing, just consistently considering the active voice would improve many writers’ output.

“It was decided that we’d lower shipping prices.” versus “Chris decided to lower our shipping prices.”

I don’t know if writers choose the former because it feels fancier, because they notice other writers doing it (maybe because they struggled to read what was written and took notice of the pattern?), or because they don’t know or don’t want to commit to what actually happened, but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.

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In your example, the primary difference for me wasn't so much active-vs-passive, but attribution. I've seen the passive voice used to great effect for softening statements and avoiding the assignment of blame/other undesirable attribute.

Instead of "Chris and Jack disagreed during the discussion", one could say "No agreement was reached during the discussion". One may say this is mealy-mouthed, but it seems to me that managing emotions is a supremely important part of being a good communicator and being a consensus-builder. Avoiding the use of language that triggers "fight-or-flight" responses is very useful in many situations.

Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus. The choice between active and passive voice should be based on this choice of focus. You can’t say categorically that the active voice is better than passive, classical rule of thumb notwithstanding.

Yeah, but to people who see what you’re doing, it’s clear that you’re dodging responsibility. Like, focusing on the action is preferable because it takes emphasis off the doer. I prefer that folks just say “we did the thing” instead of saying “the thing was done”. We know who did it, trying to shade that fact away with grammar just looks suspicious.

Go for it. Meanwhile those of who like having clients will avoid directly blaming them.

>Passive voice can be used to omit the doer of the action, which is preferable when the action itself is the focus.

Behold, the most important thing to know about business writing:

>Chris broke the build.

>The build was broken.

"The team decided to let chris break the build." ;)

Still to finger-pointy. Try "a build breakage occurred".

"The set of broken expanded to include the build."

Jesus.

We Chrises can never get a break... unless its the build. -_-

For the simplest of communications, like an IM or short email, maybe using checklist rules does impart more good than bad.

But I think in larger writing pieces, including those technical in nature, these rules produce low quality writing. In my experience it produces extremely curt, choppy writing with overall bad flow. It almost feels like a bulleted list converted to a paragraph, with a sprinklings of "and"s, "so"s and "because"s. And while "flow" sounds like a wishy-washy concept, I think it is effectual and worthy of first level consideration. It shapes how well your ideas synthesize together, and ultimately how well you communicate your thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

> but it’s incredibly frustrating to read a sea of passively voiced sentences about what happened.

Tolstoy's War and Peace would frustrate you to insanity in that case.

This "rule" against passive voice doesn't exist in every language.

What looks like good writing in English may look like childish, repetitive prose in other languages.

The "rule" doesn't exist in English either.

Most of the people complaining about the passive have either serious trouble identifying a passive at all, or can't construct an argument why it's bad to save their lives, as amply demonstrated by Geoffrey Pullum. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf Section 2 is a bit technical, but the rest is a great read.

The former allows hiding or diverting blame for an action, which is part of why it's so popular with corporations and law enforcement.

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