I didn't mean to imply that it was just in his opening sentences that 
Orwell used passives, rather that he couldn't resist the passive.   (The same is 
true for E. B. White, Stephen King, and all other writers who have ruled 
against the passive.   In any case, thanks for your example, Karl, and I love "the 
law of prescriptive retaliation."

        Re Linda's suggestion on identifying passives, none of Orwell's 
passives that I found used a "by"-phrase, and I'm all but certain that in their 
corpus, Quirk et al found that 80% of all passives did not contain a "by"-phrase. 
  A stated or implied passive would be a much more useful test for students, 
except that, in my experience, at least, they don't do well filling out the 
implieds.

Ed Schuster


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