Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.
E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.
Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.
Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns.
We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows:
I smuggled in presumptions of attributes.
The presumptions were covert.
The attributes were essential.
it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse?
In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.)
But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction:
The capitalists are squalid.
We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.)
But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality!
Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.
We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute.
Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.
This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes:
I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.
Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker:
Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade.
And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again:
Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade.
Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade.
Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent:
Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.
Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective:
Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.
But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs:
Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.
As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".
As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity!
But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.
I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.
That's a cool Easter egg page, where the main article text itself is in E-Prime (in use, not in mention), except for where it lists the criticisms and counterarguments - that part has copious amounts of "to be" :)
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.
I can’t find it, but I remember reading an article a year or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice more often than most of their contemporary writers.
If you always turn right at every intersection, you will just go around and around the same block. Which way you should turn depends on where you want to go.
Right (ha), but that's kinda how one can approach passive voice too?
If you never use passive voice, you will be unable to emphasize the object of the sentence in cases where it might actually be necessary, and end up requiring more words to get the same effect.
If you never make left turns, you end up having to go past one block and make three right turns.
So even though best practices might be to avoid passive language for various reasons, sometimes it is cleaner. And even though best practices are to avoid left turns (for efficiency, safety, etc), sometimes it's worth it to just take the left turn. So even UPS trucks will make left turns, just not nearly as often.
Well, I do think you should make right turns more often than left turns (in countries that drive on the right), and you should use the active voice more often than the passive voice, say three to ten times more often. But that's very different from the advice to only ever make right turns or to only ever use the passive voice.
Which way you should turn depends on where you are trying to go; which voice you should use depends on what you are trying to say, who your audience is, what you want to emphasize, and so on.
You didn’t originally say anything about always turning right at every intersection and neither did the GP. I had the same two thoughts as GP when I read your analogy.
No. That is what roundabouts, curved roads etc are for. Left turns are generally more problematic due to crossing incoming traffic etc.. Hence planning avoids them for good reason and there are much more right turns.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.