Seven Sins of Writing | Hacker News Reader

Seven Sins of Writing

hamilton.edu

129 pointspaint116 comments

Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow.

The whole idea behind Williams' (and Gopen's and McEnerny's – they are all from the University of Chicago) style is that you should arrange your words so that they sit in the correct positions. Namely something old in the beginning of the sentence (paragraph, section...), something new in the end. Something important in the stress position. Something contextual in the topical position. Etc.

The use of the passive is precisely that it lets you rearrange sentences so that certain parts go in "the other" position, that would be unnatural in an active construction, but that is correct in the logic of the sentence.

This is practical style, by the way. Look up Thomas' and Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth" for a discussion of different styles and a tutorial in "classic style".

> Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow.

Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

Ah ah.

I don't get those two though:

> Verbs have to agree with their subjects

> Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky

The first sin is to throw an enormous popup in my face before showing the contents.

Exactly. It took me 2 seconds to swear and close the site so I could read HN comments instead. This happens so much that I often just skip the original articles and go to the comments. HN is the only site where I do that.

I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences.

People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

These rules are for students writing essays, not Nabokov.

That makes sense. I clearly didn't read the paratext closely enough :)

The problem is most people aren’t Nabokov.

(And Nabakov as a poet, translator of poems and expert on prosody was very, very good at writing fluidly - he could afford to be wordy.)

They are not Hemmingway either.

It's a lot more obvious in academic writing and other non-fiction. Using a lot of big words to make a simple point is often a sign that the writer is trying to signal intelligence rather than convey information.

In literature the goals are different, but I still think the rule applies in most cases. Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.

I mostly agree with you. But I think great writers have, instead, earned the skill of when and how to be wordy for desired effect.

> Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.

When an average writer tries write like Hemmingway, the prose is boring and unreadable. It reads like highschool summary report of the story rather then story.

Also, in non-fiction, writers who use the shortest possible way to express things are super hard to read. Meantime, writers who use more space are often much easier to understand.

We see this today in movies. Whatever his faults, Joss Whedon is a damn good writer. But today we have a surfeit of inferior writers who make their characters sound "quippy" in imitation of Whedon and these characters become fatiguing to watch.

Wordiness, in the fantasticly useful advice I am quite frequently accustomed to receiving in the rare and unusual (I cannot go so far as to say unique though that is nearly as a tick to a dog true) circumstances that have led me to receiving others thoughts on my quite elegant prose might be characterized as inserting too many brilliantly (to the astute author) descriptive adverbs and adjectives that somehow impede the understanding normal dull attention deprived reader.

Also: using more words that fewer

I guess I just don't see sentences like this, even from novice writers.

I don't see sentences like this, even from novices.

For example:)

Btw, Stephen Brust has a series of books whose authorial tone is explicitly wordy, and he makes it work.

Literary wordiness is conscious use of language for poetic effect. It's fine in certain kinds of fiction if you can make it work. (Harder than it looks.)

Outside of literature, wordiness is usually an attempt to appear formal, archaic, and authoritative. It tries to introduces a difference in distance and status, and often comes across as pompous.

Simple examples: "utilise" for "use" "refrain from [doing the thing]" for "not [do the thing]", "I am minded to" for "I will/might."

A lot of business writing, some tech writing, and many scientific papers are unnecessarily wordy.

"Whether adults with obesity can achieve weight loss with once-weekly semaglutide at a dose of 2.4 mg as an adjunct to lifestyle intervention has not been confirmed."

Which really just says "We gave our volunteers this dose of this drug but nothing much happened."

That's a little exaggerated, and papers without the wordiness probably wouldn't pass peer review.

But still.

Hmmm, let's demonstrate wordiness :)

> I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences.

Does wordiness mean restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences?

> People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

People who complain about wordiness point to Hemingway and Carver. I personally find it a joy to read Nabokov despite his wordiness, and I do not think my reading enjoyment is related to being wordy.

* Sorry about this, thought I will have some fun. This is not chatGPT, just my own effort, and both your para and my para does not call out whether Hemingway is wordy or concise !!

This is hilarious

touche :)

I don't think you got the last sentence right.

I once noticed that people who are used to quickly read tons of texts often don't get the meaning of more winded sentences right. (I assume chatgpt would have the same issue.) But the fault was mine of course, since I did not distinguish between texts written to convey information and "literary" texts written for amusement.

In the age of LLMs it makes you wonder though, if all this writing advice isn't out of date. Concise texts are for AIs, wordy texts are for humans.

>I personally find it a joy to read Nabokov despite his wordiness, and I do not think my reading enjoyment is related to being wordy.

> [original:] Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

This sentence is a great example of how the main semantics of the sentence are actually the same but their subtext are entirely different. In both cases, the main point is that GP concludes that 'reading enjoyment is not correlated to wordiness'.

But in the first case, Nabokov is enjoyable despite the wordiness, whereas in the original it sounds more like it's an important part of the charm; reducing it would not improve enjoyment, and probably reduce it. It is almost opposite.

As an aside I think it's quite a dumb rule. If wordiness is bad, you'd get maximum enjoyment from a summary. Wordiness should be correlated in a more complex way to what is being told, the impression it should make, and the place within the narrative flow.

Another aside, the ChatGPT version (much more respectful of semantics, but barely more concise): Those who emphasize this often refer to writers like Hemingway and others such as Carver. While these writers are more skilled than me, I still favor reading Nabokov. Could Nabokov have expressed his idea more succinctly? Likely, but I wouldn't have found it more enjoyable.

Book hack: some lengthy autobiographies have an ‘about the author’ section on the inside cover.

Tell ChatGPT to rewrite your article. See why it's output is longer than the original text. That's wordiness.

Don't read much Stephen King, do you?

I jest. But seriously...

I recently read Smart Brevity and it had a number of tips to deal with wordiness.

Use simple words and be direct.

One way to see wordiness:

When you’re speaking, whatever your thoughts are have to come in the order that you think them, because people are used to being interrupted and therefore don’t want to stop talking to pick the right wording. So they say things in a very long way, just as they thought of them, in a disorganized jumble not dissimilar to this paragraph.

Writing, however, can be edited to make points clearly, without irrelevant detail, and logically ordered.

https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/writing/seven-sin... provides a bit more context and example.

remove the words that don't add to the meaning of the sentence. that aside, this is in an academic setting and not prose where the rules are not hard and fast.

I can get behind this. Interesting that all three examples provided are improved by removing a "to be" verb. Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Several of the changes both in that article (“The reason that General Lee invaded…”) and in other examples from this topic take out relevant information from the reader about emphasis of what’s being said.

Perhaps (theory just concocted!) taking these helpers out puts more effort on the reader, thus putting the text on a higher relationship of authority with the reader, and that makes it seem “stronger” writing!

> This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

I'd say that wordiness is when you can remove words from a story without taking away something of value from it, like clarity, pacing or flavor.

I went to a small show the other day, and was thinking about how tough it is to package up that feeling. An audio recording or a video or photograph can capture some, kinda. Sort of a sad shadow of the real thing.

Writing is the only thing I could think of that could come close to evoking the feeling. Clearly, you wouldn't hear the songs, but the feeling is so hard to convey any other way.

Hemingway's voice is good for telling the kinds of stories Hemingway liked to tell. I've started Lolita, but never quite got around to finishing it.

I think, for some ideas, the only hope of communicating them is through writing, and trying to connect them to shared ideas. Some writers have a very lush style because they write lush stories.

I'm not an English major, I don't have a lot of tools for critical analysis of books. But I read Snowcrash about a dozen times. It gets a lot of criticism, I think, because it's a weird disjointed set of short stories, each featuring a neat idea, that are all kind of related. I love that book. It's like each section is a facet of an intricate gemstone. Slowly, over many reads, I finally put together the connections and the relationships.

We're pretty good at gathering up and packaging drama and comedy to sell soap. Deeper stories, more complex relationships, more complex environments are so hard to capture, much less convey to a message reciever. some messages require a lot of work to understand. They're not so good for selling soap.

in general, sure, be tight with writing. But sometimes you need those apparently superfluous words to really draw the reader into the world, or the experience. I think, at least in part, the work of the reader helps drive that emotional link.

Writing tips in OP seem great for certain types of nonfiction writing. Are the most prominent works of Hemingway and Nabokov (and Carver) fiction or nonfiction? Why are we treating fiction and nonfiction writing styles as having similar goals or needing similar advice?

Wordiness is inefficiency but some things are better left unoptimized.

When you're a beginner it's important to know the rules. Then as you develop your style you can decide which rules to break.

To understand wordiness read any of Dickens with the fact he was paid based on the length of the book. Not the sales.

He will describe, in excruciating detail, the inconsiquential aspects of a one time characters outfit.

I used to believe that too, but that's not the case it seems. https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html

He's hardly the only author from that period given to what today would be considered extravagantly verbose prose. Lots of things were different about that age - arguably the typical readers of a Dickens or Bronte novel wouldn't have the exposure to the variety of experiences we take for granted these days, and intricate descriptions of seemingly inconsequential details were their equivalent of the saturation of the senses we now get from TV/cinema etc. And remember he was also capable of sentences like "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"...which is about as succinct and powerful you can get given the complexity of what he was describing.

I could use that. I recently read a novel that had a secondary character - incorporeal being - but it had no description of appearance. Aaaargh. How I should see it?

Rules that apply to non-fiction (what I guess Hamilton is after) usually doesn't really apply to fiction. Those rules make sense (kinda) for non-fiction, but I would certainly not apply them blindly to write fiction.

Try reading a few pages of Marx's writing. It's unbearable.

I think Das Capital is ok, at least volume 1. And the communist manifesto was also an ok reading. His other writtings, however are far more difficult to read. But if you think they are unbearable, stay away from Hegel.

Here you need to start considering the goal of the text and different tools work for different kinds of work. With Diataxis[1] in mind:

In a non-fiction reference style document, neither repetition nor wordy descriptions have a place. Repetition in such a document always risks inconsistency, redundancy and breeds confusion for the reader. That's very much not good.

In a guide or educational material, repetition gains a function. If the document is supposed to teach, repetition from different point of view increases retention and anchors the new knowledge better, by placing it in more contexts. In a guide, repetition can act as beneficial redundancy - re-checks of work for example.

In a fictional work, it's a style of writing. Some modern authors for example vary the wordiness or terseness to signify the overall sense of alarm and pressure on the character. Like, if nothing is going on, they spend words on just showing how everything is good for the character at the moment - smells of the coffee, the sun with a light breeze, how you either smell the flower shop to the left or the spice shop to the right, how there's a dog running after a bee. It's a lot of words with very little progress, but that's how a peaceful sunday morning in a cafe is.

And once the dramatic action starts, they switch to a much terser style. Suddenly, only a few things matter. The weight of a weapon on arms, the recoil in a shoulder, cover, screams, the path to regroup.

This ends up being a matter of writing style and reading taste. For example, it was too much for me in some parts of Tolkiens works.

[1]https://diataxis.fr/

Most writing is about giving people the information they want or need while respecting their time. In that sense, I find technical writing to be very close to UX design. If you want to write well, you must know your audience's needs and struggles.

This is always left out of style guides, yet it's a core element of good writing. Clear writing is pointless if it clarifies the wrong things.

It does not just require good writing skills, but also empathy and understanding.

I’ve always seen recommendations to avoid passive voice in writing. However, when I encounter passive voice it doesn’t bother me. It also is one of my more frequent writing mistakes. Is this still considered bad practice?

As a general rule, yes.

Yes. Some people (especially when they're trying to sound formal or impartial) use the passive voice way too much.

The interesting question is if passive voice is so bad, how did it come about in the English language and why did it survive? That directly contradicts a lot of this advice.

Though I try to use primarily active voice because it helps me save on word/page count when I'm trying to submit papers to conferences.

Passive voice in itself is benign. It provides flexibility, and it lets you emphasize the target of an action, or the action itself over the do-er, if that fits your intent.

Advice to avoid passive voice comes from a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most charitable (and I think useful) view would be:

* In technical writing, you might have pick up passive voice because of misguided advice to use avoid "I" and "we". This naturally leads you to using passive voice all over the place. This makes the writing "seem more objective", but is really just the veneer of objectivity. And in some ways is the polar opposite of the advice to always avoid passive voice. English has both voices - use them both. If nothing else (and all other things were equal), active voice tends to be more concise - as you have noted - which is a true benefit for technical writing.

* Passive voice is one of tools employed when weaseling or obfuscating (see the infamous "mistakes were made"). Advice to avoid the passive voice is either nudging you to either... just be more honest (don't weasel!), or to be more clever in your weaseling (because everyone knows the trick...)

* Because use of passive voice in more mundane/banal communication is so common (or seemingly so common), there was a perception that people were just defaulting in the passive because that's what government officials, or companies or whatever talked like. And so the advice was pushback. Reminding you that you don't have to speak or write like a prepared government speech or press release.

Do you find yourself having to reply to difficult questions about an unnecessary war in the Middle East ?

Try this: "Mistakes were made."

Passive voice makes sense when the topic of interest isn't the subject.

Look at those headlines about Kennedy's death: https://www.manisteenews.com/news/slideshow/10-front-pages-f... Most of these headlines are passive, because the topic of interest isn't the (unknown) murderer, or the bullets themselves, but the victim.

"Kennedy assassinated, Connally seriously wounded by shots" is way stronger than "somebody assassinated Kennedy, shots seriously wounded Connally". Ditto with "Kennedy to be buried in Arlington", which is way better than "a person will bury Kennedy in Arlington".

It's not a mistake or bad practice at all. I really don't understand the hate for passive voice in style guides (particularly American ones, IME). It's like saying "palm muting is the first sin of guitar playing". No, it's a valid aesthetic choice that everyone will have a different subjective opinion on in different contexts. There are also many contexts when the subject of the verb is of little importance, so passive voice is the more obvious choice

The one exception is writing where accessibility is key. Apparently there is objective evidence that EAL and lower-ability native speakers may find it confusing to parse, but if you're instead writing "to entertain" (in a very broad sense), or for a high-ability audience, this likely is not relevant

The other justifications like "active voice strikes the object" just sound like standard bad linguistics and getting hung up on the name, rather than any valid critique

As for "it's used to shirk responsibility" ("mistakes were made") - that's plenty easy to do in active voice ("experts say x"). Shiftiness is a function of semantic content (or lack thereof) not grammar, and people generally aren't stupid enough to not notice you dodging just because you did it in passive

>people generally aren't stupid enough to not notice you dodging just because you did it in passive

But if you write in passive voice for no particular reason, they may think you are when you weren't trying to.

A few thoughts.

1. Luckily this page isn't titled "Seven Sins of Webpage Design".

2. The sins are highly variable in their specificity and scope. They range from low level grammar problems (incorrect apostrophes) to "wordiness", which is far more abstract, and "in the eye of the beholder"

3. The last sin is a pointer to a list of other sins. In what sense is this "Seven Sins"? Feels shoehorned into a listicle (see point 1).

The "treating data as singular" one is interesting - "data" as a plural is actually one of my biggest pet peeves because I strongly suspect that realising that it is technically the plural of "datum" is the only reason people started using it like that. The actual concept it conveys is almost always not a plural: it's more like "sand" than "pebbles".

In British English data is a collective singular.

The whole British English thing of "companies are plural nouns" (e.g. "Apple are creating a VR headset") simultaneously makes so much sense from how companies actually are (vs the American English that treats the company as a singular individual) and sounds completely wrong to me lol

British English usage would distinguish between the cases when the company as an entity in itself does something and when the people who comprise the company do something.

Here Centrica is regarded as a singular:

"It is the third time Centrica has upgraded its annual expectations this financial year,"

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/british-gas...

Exactly. And the fact that (probably) none of these people ever use the singular "datum" in writing makes the whole thing reek of gate-keeper-y "I am smart and you are not because I know a Latin thing".

Also, every single time I see this "gripe" I am tempted (but don't because it helps nothing) to go "hmm, interesting you don't have the same issue with 'agenda'."

The term is "collective noun":

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=collective+noun&...

My disappointment in my education is how much these rules were emphasized over content.

The hard part of writing is content--not syntax.

Just like programming is about logic, and syntax is a minor nitpick one needs to know.

But I think the real reason these rules were emphasized so much is that they are easy to grade and explain.

I agree with this, people seriously underestimate the degree to which minimum viable effort is the guiding principle of the education stack. Making students engaged in writing critically and creatively and communicatively is a much more difficult and poorly defined task than inventing or choosing at random (from style guides that have never been used by any impactful writers ever) rules of English grammar and style and then mechanistically applying them. This generates an exceedingly great amount of profit for the textbook writers and professional development folks that reinvent and retrain teachers in ad-hoc ineffective techniques every two years. Teachers, administrators, curriculum, textbook authors, school boards, edtech, local politicians, and students all conspiring to make education as mechanistic and unimpactful as possible because it satisfies the requirements of the world external to education while demanding the least possible effort and interest from all who participate. There are many, many exceptions of course, especially among the two classes that have a primary existence instead of a rent-seeking one (teachers and students), but this is the rule in the United States today.

If you’ve ever read students’ writing, you’d immediately understand why these rules exist.

Many students can’t get the basics down — and their writing is borderline illegible. How are they supposed to master content when they can’t master form?

I don't think these kind of rules are a good way to master form, either.

The occasional mixing up of "its" and "it's" (or even "you're" and "your") really isn't the major problem; this rarely causes confusion or makes text flow bad. Even though it looks sloppy in professional writing, it's fine in a great many contexts.

One of the so-called "illogical" examples is "Walking back from the village, my wallet was lost", because apparently "Does your wallet walk?", and the the "correct" is "Walking back from the village, I lost my wallet", which is basically the same sentence for everyone because no one was confused about a walking wallet in the first example (I personally don't like either by the way, and would write "I lost my wallet while walking back from the village").

Good writing is mainly about whether 1) text reads and "flows" fluidly, and 2) if it gets the point across. My main trick to get this right is to read things out loud in my head, but there are probably other ways, some of which may be better. It's certainly not about boring spelling details or personal preferences.

Some sins of technical writing:

Undefined/vague abstractions or methaphors: Leave the meaning of notoriously overloaded terms like component, plugin, container etc. unexplained in your specific context of writing.

Homonyms: One term has several meanings. E.g., "server" is either a machine or a OS process.

Synonyms: One meaning has several terms. E.g., "module" and "project" in Maven.

No examples: Only rely on the reader ability to interpret pure abstractions instead of giving him/her examples to abstract from. E.g., provide only the EBNF of a certain language.

One that annoys me is when authors use multiple different terms for the same thing. In fiction, variety can be excellent, but in technical writing, it really adds to the readers' workload. I remember reviewing a doc where, depending on which section you were reading, the terms 'design', 'architecture' 'system' and IIRC 'component framework' were used interchangeably. This made following the reasoning hard because the doc was itself a review of two distinct technical solutions.

This often happens when a doc has multiple authors and no global consistency checking.

PASSIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution was documented in a letter to James Madison. ACTIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson documented his support of the new Constitution in a letter to James Madison.

IMO the passive voice makes much more sence for this example.

a letter sent to James Madison documented Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution. ?

Maybe

  documented
    sent
      letter
        a
      James Madison
        to
    Constitution
      the
      new
      of
        support
          Thomas Jefferson's

???

Passive doesn't just sound better in the example, it's objectively correct.

Jefferson wasn't attempting to document anything. That wasn't the action he was taking at all. We only consider it documented after the fact; it's completely incidental to what he was trying to accomplish.

Therefor, only the passive voice describes what occurred. The only people actively documenting anything are those who deliberately set out to create documentation of events (and I think they might all be assholes, as a rule... so maybe he was actively documenting?).

It depends on whether Thomas Jeferson wrote the letter or someone else.

Imo, the difference is in the focus. The passive voice version makes the "support of the new constitution" the most important thing the sentence is about. The active voice makes "Thomas Jefferson" the most important thing the sentence is about.

So, it really depends on what the rest of the paragraph is supposed to be about.

Which is why the blanket aversion many style guides have to the passive voice makes no sense. Use it when it makes sense to use it, obviously. Often, the subject of the verb really is of little importance, particularly in formal accounts of events

Any Jerry Pournelle fans here? One thing he said was that to become a proficient writer, you needed to write enough to fill a steamer trunk and his view was that the trunk full of writing was not fit to publish and the biggest sin in writing was selling anything in that trunk after you became recognized as a writer because it was only accepted because of its provenance and not its quality.

“Avoid the passive voice” is a rule that annoys me. Sometimes, the rule that’s annoying is more important than the person that’s being annoyed.

There should be an (n+1)th rule for these lists that's break the rules when you want, just know you're breaking them and do it because you like the result better, not out of sloppiness.

My teachers told me this is true for almost all lists of rules. YMMV.

Rules (which don’t involve courts & prisons) are just shorthand for reasons.

The better you understand the reasons behind the rules, the easier it will be to know when to break them.

Or, in an artistic sense, how best to dramatically or subtly break them in service to some creative perspective.

Any of them! All of them!

This is as true in architecture, rocket design, fashion and etiquette, as it is in prose.

—-

And this is why organizations that impose process without delegating and encouraging an organization-wide agency to make intentional exceptions, smother innovation so effectively.

They lose most of their creative and adaptive abilities.

> a rule that annoys me

None of these are meant to be "rules" in my understanding. The post starts with "In most instances", so it leaves plenty of room for "exceptions" to the list based on what you intend to convey.

The problem is that most people who say this don't know what the passive voice means. What they want to say is make the most important noun in the sentence the subject and keep the subject near the beginning of the sentence. That concept is only tangentially related to the grammatical voice being used.

Sometimes passive voice is the best way to do that though, because the subject of the action is more important (e.g. the target of a shooting rather than the shooter). Using active voice would either put the important person at the end, or might require you to find an alternative verb with reversed arguments, resulting in more awkward phrasing

Yes, passive voice is used effectively all the time. The rule was created by grammarian's who didn't understand its effectiveness or overstated its necessity. Judgement should be used to determine when it works.

> Passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject receives an action. In contrast, active voice produces a sentence in which the subject performs an action.

Setting aside whether the passive or active voice is better, I'm delighted by this description of what each is.

Woulda been awesome if the first sentence were written in passive voice.

Weak writing though. The sentences form a deliberate parallel structure, making it clear how the two voices differ.

I can't grok "receives an action".

What does "receives" mean?

Looking at the example, I can only see that the active voice variations have:

- The action after the subject - The action closer to the subject than the passive voice variation - The subject earlier in the sentence than the passive voice variation

Can a sentence specifically be active or passive voice, or are active and passive on opposite ends of a spectrum where one sentence is said to be more active or more passive than another sentence?

>Five people were shot in a police-related incident

is a passive voice. The people receive the action.

>A policeman shot five people today

is active voice. The policeman shoots people.

I use this particular example because it's a prime example of voice for the deflection of responsibility, see https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209

Sin 7: introducing a small number of categories each of which promises to cover one point, and sticking to the format until the last category, which is stuffed with 17 more independent points.

I like how one of the rules is basically about "its" and "it's". I think English made a big mistake by making this irregular; both forms should have been "it's". I hope it's issues are fixed in English v2. (You just read the first sentence in English v2!)

I presume this is a joke. Languages evolve over time (centuries in the case of English), there are very few examples of designed languages. English is especially complicated because it emerges from a melting pot of germanic, Latin, Greek, French, etc. The form of the word its emerged through a linguistic process that took a long, long time. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its#

Yes, it was a joke.

English is already on version 3 at least.

I really like the "Pet Peeves" one. In English and other languages, I fight against what I call "adverbializing" by which I mean putting unnecessary adverbs and adverbial phrases everywhere, especially in speech; these include "equally", "in truth", "definitely", "veritably" (favourite word of an old boss of mine who thought it made him sound like an intellectual).

I'm rather against the interdiction of the passive voice, or the interdiction of shifting the reader's point of view. While the passive voice can very quickly damage clarity, not every text should read like a to-do list.

Different styles can be pertinent, just don't think writing in a complicated manner will make people want to read you.

> PASSIVE VOICE: My first trip abroad is one I will always remember.

This is the first time I've heard such a construction described as being in the passive voice by an authoritative source. Is it a mistake, or has the meaning of "passive voice" changed?

It's a mistake. The passive voice of the sentence "I will always remember my first trip abroad" is "My first strip abroad will always be remembered by me".

Yet another tip in the "person saying 'passive voice bad!' unable to actually identify it" jar then

What is the proper term then for OP's construction? I note that both it and yours above introduce the verb "to be", though differently conjugated: "is" vs. "be".

It’s a standard active voice sentence. “that I will always remember” is a relative clause applying to “one”.

Arguably most eloquent, though now non-standard and a bit of a challenge to parse:

"My first trip abroad I will always remember."

Since it's a theme in more than one comment thread:

If you're a contrarian, I'd soften rules to constraints.

Their utility is less in what they do to your results than in what working within them does to you.

Constraints force you to be attentive and mindful, and this helps you understand the tools, materials, and techniques at your disposal.

It someone scolding you about passive voice is offputting, talk yourself into writing pair of stories or posts or journal entries in entirely passive and entirely active voice.

Be fastidious about both. Learn your materials.

Why the hell is passive voice so frowned up by Americans?

I think you mean "Why the hell do Americans frown on passive voice?" ;)

I blame the early MS Word grammar checker which always called out passive voice as poor style. :P I'd imagine it was written that way because passive voice was easy to detect, and corporate power posturing tended to paint passive voice as 'weak'.

That said, passive voice is also associated with weasel wording and evasiveness, so if you're trying to communicate clearly and directly, it might not be the best way to phrase things.

I suspect Elements of Style is at the root of "avoiding passive" being popular advice.

It's a decent rule of thumb for those of us who accidentally slip into writing in the passive. Too much passive leads to writing that feels less direct, less active. Alas, as with every rule of thumb, you will get people who take it as a commandment and loudly denounce any and all use of passive, thinking they're being clever. I worked with a tech doc writer who liked to point out passive voice usage in peoples' work emails. Whatever gets you through life I guess...

so an aspect of passive voice use is the difference between transitive and intransitve verbs. passive voice needs transitive verb use, a subject receives the action of a transitve verb, right? you cant use intransitive verbs with a passive voice

I don't understand Sin Seven.

Number seven is miscellaneous issues; you need to click through to see them.

One of the complaints is "treating data as singular". My view is that "data" is obviously a mass noun and treating it as plural is pointlessly pedantic.

Should be called The 6 Deadly Sins and a Myriad of Minor Mistakes.

Or, ‘The 6 Deadly Sins and Myriad Minor Mistakes’

It's missing "Webster's dictionary defines The Seven Sins of writing as...."

Sin 8: clichéd titles

and bullet points?

Be clear about what the passive voice is:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

> It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on.

(Needless to say, none of those are in the passive voice. Of course, some people think questions are in the passive voice, so perhaps this education is a lost cause.)

Moving on:

> Concise writing is key to clear communication. Wordiness obscures your ideas and frustrates your reader. Make your points succinctly.

The funny thing is, they wrote this without intending to be ironic.

Finally:

> Each student must meet with their advisor.

They mark this as incorrect, which it is not, and which marks them as being innovative and ignorant. Innovative, in that they're trying to invent new rules for English to follow, and ignorant, in that they think they're being traditionalists.

Cites:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history

> The plural they originated around the 13th century, and it didn’t take long for its singular form to emerge. As professor and linguist Dennis Baron writes in a post at the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known instance of the singular they can be found in the medieval poem William and the Werewolf from 1375. A section translated from the Middle English to modern English reads, “Each man hurried [. . .] till they drew near [. . .] where William and his darling were lying together.” Because most language changes develop orally before they’re written down, this form of they likely had been in use for years by this point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200121102050/https://www.nytim...

https://archive.ph/jnODV

> For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is older than singular “you.” Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou” and “thee.”

Finally, this:

> Each student must meet his or her advisor.

Is marked as correct, but it isn't. Some people don't identify as "He" or "She" and trying to "Grammar" them into submission is simply idiotic.

I was surprised when reading The Sense of Style by Pinker (not a book I would recommend incidentally) that the use of 'they' as a generic pronoun was still considered controversial. Pinker opts to alternate his chapters with he, then she, then he again – he explains this is to avoid the issue of having to otherwise use he/she type constructs. Had he used 'they', I would've never thought anything of it. Maybe it's a geographical thing?

Pinker is 68; it was extremely uncommon to use "they" for most of his life. I can completely understand it just sounds "wrong" to him, because it really is quite a radical shift to how the word was used (none of this "it's been in use since the 14th century" bollocks please; it fell out of use since well before Pinker was born – you would be unable to even understand English as spoken in the 14th century because it's a different language – it's a bad faith bullshit argument)

I've been using 'they' as a generic pronoun since before it was cool, but I'm also not a native English speaker and a lot younger. In my native Dutch there isn't really a good equivalent of a gender-neutral 'they', but people have tried to introduce it in recent years and it all just sounds spectacularly wrong to me, because I guess my brain is hard-wired to consider these things wrong.

Changing language takes time.

I think most people that point to the historical use of the singular 'they' aren't trying to make any kind of bad faith argument – I think it's more an attempt to justify the modern usage by pointing to historical precedent as many folks feel that adds legitimacy.

Personally, 'they' singular has sounded natural to me my whole life. How much of that is generational and how much of it is regional variation would be interesting to know.

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