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0 pointsfennecfoxen6y ago0 comments

Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself would be weakened if I were to begin, "Joseph M Williams promotes the passive voice." Our communication would only be hindered if we were to highlight the incidental matter of his authorship.

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tom_mellior6y ago· 1 in thread

That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice as a tool to avoid responsibility."

The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform "does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".

fennecfoxenOP6y ago

Well excuse me

I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author for the book and you don't pay me.

Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people who bother to try, jerk.

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