The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing ...

William Germano finds it ironic that academics warn their students off the passive voice while peppering their own writing with that construction (“Passive Is Spoken Here,” The Chronicle ...

Until they do. A few weeks ago, one of the copy editors in my social media feed stumbled across a blog post by a writing coach offering tips and insights about passive voice and when and how to ...

Use the passive voice when you don’t know who is doing an action, or to emphasise that an action is being done to something or someone, rather than focusing on who or what is doing the action.

PITY the passive voice. No feature of the grammar of English has such a bad reputation. Style guides, including that of The Economist, as well as usage books like the celebrated American ...