“How to use the passive voice”
Any teacher who has seen student-writers work to strip all sense of agency from their sentences (“It will be argued that,” “It is observed that”) understands the point of “Use the active voice.”
Oliver Kamm on The Elements of Style
Oliver Kamm, writing in The Sunday Times, exhorts his reader to “ditch the style guides and stop worrying about passives.” And he points to a usual suspect.
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
“The Sense of Style is a disappointing book. It presents its author as a figure of urbane intelligence — witty, knowing, calmly superior — doing battle against agitated, deluded, self-styled experts. But the enemy in this book is a straw man or woman, or a whole army of straw folk. And the non-imaginary writer whose work poses perhaps the greatest challenge to Pinker’s own claim to authority is nowhere to be found in these pages.”
McGrath on Pinker on Strunk and White
“Like Pinker, McGrath repeats Geoffrey Pullum’s claim that Strunk and White do not understand the passive voice. As I’ve argued in a response to Pullum’s take on The Elements of Style, that claim is a misreading of the plain sense of Strunk and White’s text.”
Pullum on Strunk and White
"Pullum's take on Strunk and White involves a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading."