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obviously you're a very passive person. also you probably think you have no influence over the world, that things happen to you instead of you doing things.
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I instantly started to look for passive voice in your writing as soon as I opened the thread 
I tend to use passive voice a lot whenever I write a first-person narrative...wait no I just use first-person pronouns etc. a lot. Hm passive voice varies a bit for me I suppose...I may or may not end up overusing it, but if I'm not supposed to do it, I just go back and change stuff.
I'm no psychoanalyst, but it could just be a quirk of yours? Nothing particularly bad, imo
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5003 Posts
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United States24600 Posts
I was reading that same page recently haha... I hadn't noticed the part about scientific writing though... that's probably a good point.
edit: On the other hand... even if you "know how to use it," I feel a lot of graders/instructors/etc will still give you a hard time and automatically tell you to change it to active voice...
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I have a science (chemistry degree), I use passive voice all the time in my writing because I'm trying to avoid using "I" or "we" or whatever. In my non-scientific writing, I tend to dislike seeing too many personal pronouns in my writing. But I don't think I ever speak with passive voice...
The difference with the 'passive' example is that the object performing the action (chicken crossing) was prioritized after the secondary object on the receiving end (the road).
This is passive voice by the way, but it doesn't feel wrong at all. Sometimes the subject of the sentence just isn't important...
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I've seen a lot of this when I'm required to critique and go over other people's writing, be it for college classes or for applications, I get the feeling that people want to sound smart and want their writing to sound smarter, and often they use passive voice thinking it makes them sound smarter. It's also because sometimes people want to fulfill a length requirement, and if you go about writing in passive voice everything gets longer.
Of course, writing in passive voice quite makes your writing week.
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Hmm...I have no idea why you would think in a passive voice. Haven't heard anyone who claims the same thing. I also haven't noticed anyone talk in passive voice. Are you a native English speaker?
With regards to passive voice in writing, I absolutely hate it. It sounds awkward when reading it. I have no idea why it's taught as the way to write scientific papers. There are plenty of journal articles in my field that are written in active voice. The only thing is that if it's not in passive voice then it's written in first person plural. It's my opinion that first person singular makes the person sound egotistical.
I guess it's a matter of choice though. There are also plenty of papers that are in passive voice.
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I think that during our formative years most of us were taught to use the passive voice and shun the active voice. Thus, we are in the habit of writing in the passive voice and fall back into those bad habits if we are not careful. I've noticed the same thing, but when I force myself to write in the active voice I express myself better both in writing and in speech. I'm still not perfect at it, but I've spent the last 4 months writing a major paper a week and I get absolutely murdered on my grades if I write in the passive voice. Maybe you just need some TA to beat it out of you like they have me?
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I use passive voice so much. Always get killed for it in my paper.
I also think in passive voice at times, so it's not just you.
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Yeah, that's how most scientific writing is, but it's still terrible.
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I would be really surprised if there were some deep psychological insight to be gained from recognizing the fact that you habitually write and speak in the passive voice. If it's something you're doing unconsciously, it's probably something you picked up unconsciously as well—from whatever milieu of conventions that you happened to grow up in. Just my armchair linguist best guess.
As for avoiding it, I would say that's probably good advice for a intermediate level college writer, but only because trying to avoiding it entirely teaches you to be aware of when you actually need to use it. In the abstract, there's nothing wrong with the passive voice. It's just more specialized than the active voice, and so defaulting to it habitually makes your writing sound kind of artificial.
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On May 03 2011 09:58 butter wrote:Yeah, that's how most scientific writing is, but it's still terrible. I tend to think that scientific writing is terrible because scientists write it. 
That is to say I don't think it's a function of their writing conventions. Really, I think a well-written, passive-voice sentence that elucidates some obscure biological mechanism sounds elegant and insightful and disinterested in a way that its active-voice counterpart wouldn't. But, yeah, the frequency at which scientific writers actually produce such sentences is depressingly low.
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English is like the only language that passive voice is considered bad grammar, and I'm not entirely sure why. It certainly has its uses, and while not always appropriate, it isn't always inappropriate either
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You sir, have the incurable disease known as the "Passive Plague". Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is put you down 
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United States24600 Posts
On May 03 2011 09:44 garbanzo wrote:
Hmm...I have no idea why you would think in a passive voice. Haven't heard anyone who claims the same thing. I also haven't noticed anyone talk in passive voice. Are you a native English speaker
Yes, I am a native English speaker. For whatever reason (probably my scientific background/interests/way of thinking) I seem to lean towards using passive voice.
edit: I think one thing I dislike about humanities is how often you get downgraded for style!
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Maybe you place more importance on "endings" so that's why you place your objects performing the action at the end of the sentence. Just a theory.
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United States889 Posts
I have no idea why people campaign against the passive voice. Speculation that it was more burdening cognitively has been tossed out the window. It isn't wrong by any stretch of the word, just perscriptively it's less frequent (upwards of 90% of sentences in normal speech are active).
As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with egocentricism. Idea formulation in speech production is barely studied (as it's practically impossible to do) but the fact that you use the passive more frequently just puts you in the company of speakers of other languages for whom their passive construction is the common structure they choose to use. Fortunately, I'm in linguistics, where the professors know there's nothing wrong with the passive voice and even advocate its use in professional writing.
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On May 03 2011 12:40 Arrian wrote:
I have no idea why the passive voice is campaigned against...
fixed it for you 
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You're the mod in law school right?
Yeah I got harped on for using passive voice as well. I remember the first time I drafted a complaint, my supervisor told me to rewrite facts & analysis section using active voice. Said I was prancing around the details too much...or something or other. Dunno, seems like an easy switch though. Just need to go back to abc-grammar, and stick to the subject-verb-object kind of writing. Seems a bit stale, but you get used to it. :/
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Besides The Elements of Style, which has (probably) done more damage to even-handed discussion of grammar and style than any book in the past century, the general bitterness toward the passive construction stems from how the construction's usage tends to attempt to pass wordiness off as eloquence. Combined with overuse of demonstrative cases, this can produce papers that read thick, flabby, pedantic, and (in the rarest and sweetest of circumstances) like Yoda.
If you're writing in the sciences (generally), you're probably just conditioned to voice everything in the passive to remove yourself from whatever it is you're writing. If you're writing anywhere else, I dunnah. But it's cool that you're more conscious of this now.
Apropos nada I tried once to get some people to diagram sentences at a party for fun because they weren't impressed by my knowledge of Pokemon. They did not join me in diagramming sentences.
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I don't think it's that unusual to be honest. Most of my english class in high school was aimed towards getting people to write in an active tense rather than a passive one, because everyone wrote in passive by default. Maybe it's just conflict between the literary world and the scientific one though, because I tend to prefer active voice in fiction while I prefer passive in lab reports or studies. Don't worry about it o.o
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On May 03 2011 16:17 jon arbuckle wrote:Apropos nada I tried once to get some people to diagram sentences at a party for fun because they weren't impressed by my knowledge of Pokemon. They did not join me in diagramming sentences.
Oh, jon, jon, jon, there is so much about this little anecdote that confuses me. Basically what you're saying is that Pokemon trivia was your plan A for wowing your fellow partiers? And then, failing that, grammar?
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Although I do tend to go to parties with devised schematics for facilitating easygoing social interaction - builds orders to ensure that I won't be quiet in the corner, if you will, where I am like Jaedong intensely committed to setting the tone early on and guiding the consequent discourse - the conversation about Pokemon I believe began with a girl who said her boyfriend bailed on the party because he'd rather play "the new Pokemon game," which conversation eventually became my barraging a group of innocent non-Pokemon-playing recent grads with densely woven speech, panegyrics to Pokemon's quiet sophistication and whimsy, gnarled and convoluted clause after clause.
You'd think a group of recent grads from MFA programs, self-promoting "writers," would be more interested in talking shop re grammar, theory, poetry, etc. You would be very wrong about that.
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Hanging around with MFAs huh? Well there's your problem right there.
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Honestly I think your use of the passive voice is more indicative of your linguistic background than your personality. I know plennnty of passive-speaking egoists...they're called law students =)
I use the passive voice often myself. But I think that's mostly a bad habit picked up from my family. Most of them work in healthcare where you need to be very, very careful when you use direct objects...theres a big difference between saying "cancer killed him" and "he died of cancer".
I don't think you need to worry about it too much. Its like worrying about saying "hullo" instead of "hello". We all bastardize the english language as far as the british are concerned =P
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On May 03 2011 17:03 HULKAMANIA wrote:
Hanging around with MFAs huh? Well there's your problem right there.
Boy, that party wasn't a good place to talk gender performativity, lemme tell you...
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I know at times I would write passively. Honestly, I don't think it's wrong or anything, as long as you don't talk/write passively about yourself almost all the time, like for interviews and resumes, etc.
Also, you shouldn't think of yourself too passively, after all you were able to actively teach me how to play sc:bw so I can not be terribad in sc2
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United States24600 Posts
On May 03 2011 15:49 lvatural wrote:
You're the mod in law school right? Um no. Not sure who you are referring to.
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wow interesting discussion, it never occured to me that the tendency to write in the passive could be a problem in itself or be indicative of underlying problems
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EPT
