Re: Usage: 1st Person and Passive Voice

["Steven N. Gotler" <sngotler -at- RUST -dot- NET>]

I disagree with the author. I have not done a thesis on writing. But I am a
writer. My livelihood depends on my ability to communicate effectively
(note I did not say "My ability to communicate effectively is dependent on
my livelihood"). I think the author's research has focused on obsolete
issues and encourages technical writers to be lazy and sloppy. Passive
voice is problematic in technical and scientific writing for many reasons.
Here are a few.

Passive voice is an inefficient and outdated form of communication. It
requires long, akward and indirect semantics to avoid the implication that
things "do" or "act". Writing is a transfer of information. Writers should
transfer that information as clearly and efficiently as possible. They
should forget outmoded and unimportant "rules".  Readers have neither the
time nor the inclination to resolve assumptions and untangle jumbles of
anachronistic phrases. Besides, people interact with machines on such a
personal level today, that they probably DO think of these "things" as
doing, acting and possessing. A program can "let" or "help" me calculate
mortgage payments. It doesn't have to "enable me to" calculate them.

Which leads me to the other problem. Passive voice is also inherently
ambiguous, and thus dangerous. Without adding even more unnecessary and
convoluted phrases to every sentence, passive voice assumes the reader
knows who is doing what, where things are going, and why. That is dangerous
in technical and scientific writing, which require precise communication. A
cpu can transfer data to the hard drive. I don't have time for data that
"is" transferred "by" the cpu "to" the hard drive, or worse yet, data that
is transferred to the hard drive, period (by what?).

Passive voice still has a place in many forms of communication. In
literature, it stimulates the reader's imagination by remaining ambiguous
until the bitter end of a long sentence. In casual conversation (a TWO-way
exchange), the speaker can more safely assume what the other knows. But in
writing, the reader cannot interact with the speaker. It is risky for the
writer to assume what the reader knows and understands. Which would you
rather see in the middle of a 300-page user's guide at 2:00 in the
afternoon when food-coma is imminent: "The data is saved by the user after
clicking the button labelled 'Transfer'" or "Click 'Transfer' to save your
data"? I know which one is more likely to induce it.

Why do I care? Because I am sick of muddling through poorly written and
awkwardly phrased sentences in technical, scientific and legal literature
(have you ever read a patent claim?). It often takes as much time to
unscramble the meaning of a paragraph as it does to read the text. No one
has time anymore for these outdated notions of man vs machine, humans vs.
animals, etc. Tell your reader what they NEED to know. Clarity and
efficiency should be the paramount concern. I don't care what someone 400
years ago thought was the proper way to write. We live a different world
today. We are certainly writing about different things.

Get with the 20th century. Or, maybe I just need to be in psycholinguistic
therapy.

S. Gotler
A technical writer who probably needs to get out more often.
----------
From:   Margaret L. FalerSweany
Sent:   Saturday, January 31, 1998 9:06 AM
To:     TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject:        Usage: 1st Person and Passive Voice

        I did my Master's thesis on the use of the passive voice
and learned some interesting things that may explain why
it's used so heavily (about 26% of sentences in a
scientific article according to a major study). The passive
construction is a powerful linguistic tool that we usually
don't notice in well-constructed writing. Please understand
that I am not advocating never converting sentences to the
active; I am advocating judicial use of such changes. Use
of the active does not guarantee well-written articles;
they can be just as turgid, pedantic, didactic, etc. as one
that heavily relies on the passive and avoids first person.
        True, the passive enables the "doer" to avoid highly
visible responsibility for the action/results reported, but
according to scientists I talked to, that responsibility is
implicit in the article. Those reading a scientific article
know about the lab and or authors (or believe they do and
assume that peer review assures that responsibility is
assigned and, thus, doesn't have to be explicitly stated
frequently throughout the article.)
Use of the passive not only shifts the attention to the
action from the actant, it often enables scientists to
avoid what they consider worse "sins" such as
anthropomorphism and teleology that can arise when things
"act."
Psycholinguistically, use of the passive enables the writer
to follow a standard expectation in English: provide given
(old) information before new. To maintain this pattern the
writer will often switch between active and passive without
thought. This need to maintain old/new patterns seems
especially visible in compound sentences.
        Additionally, it appears that altering some sentences to
the active may severely (in the thoughts of the
writer/reader) change the semantic meaning intended. My
reading suggested this was particularly true when the
writer was using models such as "ought to be," "might be,"
 and "should be" which are strongly linked to
intention/probability/chance relationships.

Margaret FalerSweany
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Humanities, WAHC 319
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931
mfsweany -at- mtu -dot- edu
906-482-0367