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dgerard@awful.systems

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Only 3%* of US AI users are willing to pay a penny for it (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[+] selkiesidhe@sh.itjust.works -7 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

I pay. Shits helping me with missing commas and reworking my passive wording... Which I do a lot...

[–] jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 5 points 10 hours ago

FTFY.

I pay. Shit's helping me with missing commas and reworking my passive wording, which I do a lot.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

Wait what, TIL there was/is a crusade against... the passive fucking voice?

Some people just need to invent problems for their life to feel meaningful, don't they

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 1 points 1 hour ago

@V0ldek

I think the crusade is mostly against media headlines and content that passive-voices police brutality and murder of Palestinians by the IDF.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

@V0ldek This is a hill I will die on: the passive voice ABSOLUTELY does not belong in a work of fiction. (Academic papers and reports are another matter entirely, but fiction: no.)

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there's fat chance it's universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.

Like I can't imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that "Someone trapped this chest!" instead of the 100% more natural "This chest was trapped!"

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 1 points 56 minutes ago

@V0ldek That's an RPG protagonist protagging. Not prose fiction. (This thought brought to you b/c I've lately been reading a multivolume LitRPG epic that I had to bail on midway through book 3 because the author dropped into passive voice with extreme clunkiness at random, infrequent intervals, making for a jarring read.)

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

This article is wild already, on the first page there's this quote

‘Do not use the passive voice when such use makes a statement clumsy and wordy. . . Do not, by using the passive voice, leave the agent of the verb vaguely indicated, when the agent should be clearly identified.’ [Edwin Woolley, Handbook of Composition, 1907, p. 20]

Emphasis mine on... a clear usage of the passive! In active this would have to be "when you should clearly identify the agent" or something of the like, the fuck, how hard is it to not expose your whole ass like this mate

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

no it isn’t, your posts are still shit

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world -1 points 10 hours ago

Whoa, calm down everyone. 😅

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

I struggled with passive wording until I learned certain tells like my use of the word "would". Once you learn what words to look out for you start to actively reword things as you write them. Asking AI to rework your passive tone isn't going to rewire your brain to write better.