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Comment by arkj | Hacker News Reader

Interesting rule!

>>a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife

I am not a native English speaker but there is a sense of something odd about this description. But (I am always confused about starting with but) I would not think anything is wrong with "a lovely old little green rectangular French silver whittling knife".

I had a team mate who always used passive voice in technical documentation. My manager always used to point it out to him but he was never able to fix it. Once he got mad and said, "Ma'am, I have no idea what you are talking about, this is the only voice I know". On his next Birthday she gifted him a copy of Lynn Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves. He later said that was the best book gift he ever got.

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Not sure why your mate's manager had a problem with passive voice. Passive voice is often the correct choice in documentation. Passive voice emphasizes the doing, not the doer. People usually don't care about who did the doing in technical documents.

As a native Swedish speaker, I tend to follow Swedish documentation writing rules even when I write English. In particular, one should always use passive voice, and also avoid terms such as "you".

In other words, write "How to achieve X", rather than "How do I do X"?

The point I want to make is that when I write documentation, and change the latter to the former, most people seem to agree it's better.

Disagree. Pervasive passive voice is an obfuscating irritant. In a description of a multi-step procedure, IMO better to switch to "you". It clearly flags actions for the reader to take. Keepin' it clear & simple.

> "a lovely old little green rectangular French silver whittling knife"

As a native speaker, but without any editorial training, this feels slightly off to me. My first edit would be something like "a lovely little old", because "lovely little" feels like it should go together. Whether that's due to alliteration or "little old lady" being a not uncommon phrase, I couldn't say for sure.

I'm with you on that one. I'd say, for example, "We went to a lovely little park", rather than "a little lovely park." The second sounds wrong for some reason.

"lovely" is an opinion, so it fits the rule to put it in front, right?

Not a native speaker, but "a little lovely" kinda sounds like an opposite to "much lovely".

That is, my parsing of "a little lovely park" is ambiguous between "a little (lovely park)" and "a (little lovely) park". With "a lovely little park" there is no ambiguity.

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