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Originally Posted by lin robinson  I agree completely and it's good to see somebody else say so. Witch hunts against passive voice and adverbs and such are the mindless slash school of writing commentators. Few who actually work in the fields say that sort of thing.
Any part of the language has reasons to be, and to be used. You don't tell painters to cut all yellows or secondaries colors, or musicians not to use doric mode or fifth chords, you don't tell writers to eliminate genera of expression. |
Grammatically correct you will find many editors who will require this to be fixed before publication. Editors, at least good ones will tell you, to eliminate genera of expression, among other things and when they do you should damned well listen to them. A certain amount percentage of passive sentences is unavoidable, but when you open up one of those handy little word processing tools that tells you there are 69.2% passive sentences, you have a real problem. A passive voice also doesn't lend itself to writing tight prose. If you want to identify and correct your passive problems in word and probably a host of other word processing programs you can set the spelling and grammar checks to point out your passive sentences.