I've never heard a good reason not to use passive voice

Present tense and passive voice are not mutually exclusive... wanna try again?

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passive voice is often used by official who are trying to dodge responsibility. there are times when its use are justified; just be wary of politicans who use it to pretend it wasn't them who fucked up.

Yeah, I've heard that. I don't see it.

Probably the most frequent reason I heard not to use passive voice is that it's "confusing." Never in my life have I been so disoriented by passive voice that it rose to the level of anything I'd even begin to call "confusion."

Probably the the worst aspect of how English is taught in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere) is that passive voice is seen as a pro se offense without going any further. LIke, the teacher or professor or whoever will say "you use passive voice often" as if that's all that needs to be said about the work's deficiencies. The response to such a critique is "yeah, and? So what?"

Ohhh

So you're constructing sentences that are much longer than they need to be, often awkward, full of abstractions, and, very often, students end up losing their grammatical construction and making errors in the sentence while they're trying to make themselves sound educated. There are good times to use passive voice (keeping focus on the subject, when the actor is unknown, etc.) but it's greatly overused by students trying to sound more sophisticated than their writing skill can handle. Then they grow up to write shit like this:

>In the event of additional hotel accommodation being required over and above that which has been booked, this should be done by telephoning the Travel team.

A politician who fucked up would say "mistakes were made" instead of "I made mistakes" to soften the statement.

All the """"advice"""" on style you get actually means 'people today are too dumb to understand anything other than simple, short, active sentences and that's why you should write like that!'

It's basically #its2017 meme.

Or "measures have been taken", but you don't know by whom

It's just more wordy and awkward

>john opened the door.
4 words

>the door was opened by john.
6 words

Exactly.

Yes, and that adds up over an essay. Besides, not all sentences are simple. But really, fuck off. If you're too attached to your pretentious wordplay to accept advice from teachers, and think it's always the reader's fault if your writing isn't clear, you're hopeless. I won't even bother quoting Orwell's essay to you.

Passive voice is good to describe, well, passive, general things. Which means that, for example, putting humans in the predicate of the passive sentence is a dumb idea

>The hotel door was swung wide open, and the foyer was shrouded in darkness. Larry took a few steps in, and felt a terrible chill crawl up his spine
First sentence is an observation made by the character, second is an action
>Somebody swung the hotel door wide open, and darkness shrouded the foyer behind. And after a few steps taken by Larry, his spine was paralyzed by a terrifying chill
Now the first sentence feels like opiniated narrative, and the second is just awkward.

All you have said is that passive voice is awkward and full of abstractions when it is awkward and full of abstractions. The same is true for active voice.

You are asserting an inherent quality to passive voice that isn't always there and is also sometimes present in active voice.

He's right though, english syntax is so shitty that passive voice always ends up clunky and annoying to read. Most european languages don't have that problem

Passive voice uses more syllables to communicate the same thing, and gives a lesser impression of action occurring in the narrative.

In "Arnold kicked the ball", the subject is acted upon by the object.
In "The ball was kicked by Arnold", the object is acted upon by the subject, leaving an overall weaker impact on the reader.

Nobody worth their salt will tell you to never, ever use passive voice, but if your prose is awash with it, then it will add up, resulting in weaker prose and a weaker narrative. Only use passive when you're absolutely sure the situation calls for it.

Also, the sentences showing those two examples contain unnecessary passive voice. Think of how much better they would sound if the passive was replaced with the active.

>That dude is shredded. How do I convert my bookish body into one like his?

fucking typo

no you fucking retarded subhuman ape, it was a play on words based on the almost identical previous post that in this case hinted at homosexual intercourse YOU FUCKING MORON

Passive voice is necessary if what you're writing about is having something done to it, but it's still the subject of what you want to speak about. For instance, if you were writing a short biography of Abraham Lincoln, it would make more sense to say "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth" because Lincoln is more important than Booth in this context. It would be jarring if the previous sentences flowed like, "In 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the rebel states. The war continued two more years and ended in 1865. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln." Booth seems to come out of nowhere. Who is this guy? But in this context he's only relevant in relation to Lincoln, so passive voice is more appropriate. The action you're emphasizing is Lincoln BEING assassinated, not the assassination itself.

Most of the time when you're writing, the focus will be on the action itself rather than it being done to the subjects.

Lol

train like an olympic athlete

thank you kind sir. very well explained.

>wordiness is bad
Tell that to the majority of prose stylists.

I do not think of whether I am using the active or passive voice when writing, I am considering what pleases my ear.

If I am putting serious thought and effort into my writing, then everything I consider 'awkward' will be rephrased. The audience does not matter to me, because I write for myself before them.

>don't use adverbs

HAHAAHAHA

Isn't passive voice, in a way, less concrete? Passive voice requires a linking verb just through English's formation of the passive voice. The verb naturally does less work conveying sensory imagery by virtue of being stuck in a participle.

If you're a high school student, which is who we tell this to, and you're writing an essay, you need all the help you can get making your sentences directly convey something concrete and sensory. And if you're a high school student writing something creative, I think we generally don't trust you enough to encourage you to work with occasionally weak sentences.

Damn, I didn't see that someone purposely rused me.

t. reddit teacher

Sounds like DFW to me desu

DFW was a reddit teacher.
>dont try anything just follow my commands if you make mistakes ur stuped 4evr and can never improve

Modelled on Eliot's comments about prose and on actually paying attention. If Eliot is reddit, this place is fucked.

Try what you want. I'm just saying that the mechanism behind active and passive voice is different in a way that makes passive voice objectively less immediate.

>some guy said it so its true
Being a fan of Eliot as a writer does not mean one has to take his comments as dogma. Your belief that one must do so is, in fact, Reddit.
>Try what you want. I'm just saying that the mechanism behind active and passive voice is different in a way that makes passive voice objectively less immediate.
Why don't you teach that instead of speaking against a perfectly valid voice? If you are so found of intimacy, why don't you act instead of merely speak?

I prefer the second. Now what?

Wow, the passive voice is really being wanted to be used by some stick in the mud in this thread.

>>In the event of additional hotel accommodation being required over and above that which has been booked, this should be done by telephoning the Travel team.
That's good legalese though.

>Telephone the Travel team if additional hotel accommodation is required.

this doesn't sound as strict of a guideline

the passive version makes it sound more like protocol that must be followed if you want adequate service

You can't. Ywn. You probably don't have the genes, the discipline, the resources, and the time. Doesn't even matter though, you can look aesthetic as fuck without getting to a ridiculous world-class level like that. Go to reddit (I'm sorry), /r/bodyweightfitness subreddit, read the "Recommended Routine" in their sidebar, do that, eat right, and you'll be aesthetic in 6 months-1 year. Add some weights too eventually if you can go to the gym (I stick to pure BWF for convenience).

>the sentences showing those two examples contain unnecessary passive voice.

All the examples of passive voice in this thread are ridiculous and needless incidences--they're sentences where almost nobody would use passive voice.

You've all sought out the most ridiculous examples and asserted them to prove passive voice should somehow magically be categorically barred from use. It's absurd.

Probably the most asinine yet:

>>In the event of additional hotel accommodation being required over and above that which has been booked, this should be done by telephoning the Travel team.

Is this a contest?

Other way around for the subject/object relationship, but otherwise good post.

"The ball was kicked by Arnold" should only really be used if the ball is supposed to be the absolute center of attention and not just a prop in the scene. In sentences where the object is center of attention an actor can often be left out, "the parcel was delivered to my door" rather than "the mailman delivered the parcel to my door."

To take a hyperbolic case it is similar to saying that you shouldn't add the word blurp into every sentence. There may be times when adding blurp to a sentence could work, say for example adding it into a sentence spoken by a drunken character, but almost without exception it doesn't add anything to a sentence and just makes it awkward for no reason.

The passive voice is similar in that unless there is a reason for using it you are just framing a sentence in a way that doesn't add anything but is weird. Unlike the blurp case there are countless examples of times when the passive voice can be used, but when it is used by good writers they always use it for a reason.

tl/dr If you don't have a clear reason why you are going to use the passive voice then don't. However, so long as there is a clear reason then its use is fine. The active voice is the default. You don't need a reason to use it.

juice and train like an olympic athlete.

Nice decree. Ironically, you're barring the use of passive voice (unless the author has a "clear reason" to use it) without mentioning a clear reason why passive voice shouldn't be used whenever the author damn well pleases.

"Doesn't add anything but is weird" is really vague language which clearly isn't applicable in all, nor probably even most, cases. Who decides what is or is not added? You? Who decides what is weird or not? You? Passive voice is often poetic and pleasurable to read, would that not be an "additon"? Even if it is weird, is this a balancing test, where "adding something" counterbalances the weirdness? When something is just "weird" doesn't it just mean you're not used to it? It's weird to "go shopping" if you live in rural Peru, but completely normal if you live in Manhattan.

Further, "a clear reason" is a very easy standard to satisfy. Meaning that if the author just thought it sounded better, it would suffice. The reason is clear, after all. Clear reasons are easy to come by; in fact, there probably aren't very many justifications an author could make for his or her choices that aren't clear.

I think most people ITT are just parroting back the "passive voice bad" blather their biddy old teachers told them.