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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 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago (22 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 3 points 4 days ago (21 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

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 1 points 3 days ago

This is doubly (triply? (N+1)ly?) ironic because this is a perfect example of when not only is it acceptable to use the passive voice, but using it makes the sentence flow more smoothly and read more clearly. The idea they're communicating here should focus on the object ("the agent") rather than the subject ("you") because the presumed audience already knows everything about the subject.

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