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In response to this, most particularly, this line:
"For starters, passive voice and excessive verbiage do not make you sound smarter."
Perhaps not. But if I try to write my reports in active voice and remove the excessive explanation, my manager will make me rewrite said reports until I reincorporate passive voice and, well, the excessive verbiage thing. Conservative company. Conservative field. I can count on one hand the number of papers I have read over the years that were written in active voice--attempts have been made (heh--I just slip into that old PV) to nudge the ocean liner away from the passive voice iceberg, but those nudges just didn't take and down we went with all hands. One technical writing instructor--an outside contractor, fwiw--tried to convince us several years ago that active voice was the way to go and that passive voice was a thing of the past, but as I noted above, it's still SOP for papers and publications. It's not good form for newsletters and interoffice communications and other less formal documents, but I fear it may remain the standard for publication, at least in some fields, for some time to come.
Can't argue much about the grammar issue, since I've run into it personally, but make sure the person you critique is a native English speaker before you hit them too hard. English is, from what I've heard, not the most logical of languages.
"For starters, passive voice and excessive verbiage do not make you sound smarter."
Perhaps not. But if I try to write my reports in active voice and remove the excessive explanation, my manager will make me rewrite said reports until I reincorporate passive voice and, well, the excessive verbiage thing. Conservative company. Conservative field. I can count on one hand the number of papers I have read over the years that were written in active voice--attempts have been made (heh--I just slip into that old PV) to nudge the ocean liner away from the passive voice iceberg, but those nudges just didn't take and down we went with all hands. One technical writing instructor--an outside contractor, fwiw--tried to convince us several years ago that active voice was the way to go and that passive voice was a thing of the past, but as I noted above, it's still SOP for papers and publications. It's not good form for newsletters and interoffice communications and other less formal documents, but I fear it may remain the standard for publication, at least in some fields, for some time to come.
Can't argue much about the grammar issue, since I've run into it personally, but make sure the person you critique is a native English speaker before you hit them too hard. English is, from what I've heard, not the most logical of languages.
