I never teach the passive as an error, or as something to be avoided in
general. I introduce the passive in the context of a discussion about
information flow.

By the time to get to me, almost all of my students have heard about the
passive, usually collocated with the exhortation not to use it, but only
a minority have any idea how to recognize it.

So I typically proceed by stressing the passive as a formal structure
for rearranging the order of elements in the sentence. By this time
we've already introduced the concepts of beginning and end focus, along
with the known-new contract.

I tell my students that their prior teachers, many of whom forbade the
use of the passive, were oversimplifying, and that when the use of the
passive fits in with the overall flow of information, it's appropriate.
When it breaks the flow, it's awkward.

I also point out the inadequacy of the purely semantic definition of
passive that students usually get, which as Herb's examples show fails
to exclude certain verbs that we know are not passive.

Karl

Veit, Richard wrote:
> As a writing teacher as well as a grammar teacher, I'd like to raise the larger question: Should we be training students to think passives are automatically bad and always to be avoided?
> 
> Since my last verb phrase in the previous sentence is passive (just like Herb's last verb phrase in his message below) it's clear that my answer is no. Often a passive construction is exactly what a writer wants to use in a given context. In our classrooms we can compare active and passive sentences and discuss the impact of each, guiding students to see when passives are less effective than active sentences and when they are more effective.
> 
> Dick Veit
> UNCW English Department
> ________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 10:43 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Recognition of passives
> 
> At least we’re talking about teachers who know what a passive is.  I have found repeatedly that teachers who mark something in a composition as passive don’t know what a passive is themselves and have incorrectly marked the offending sentence.  Often the presence of a “be” verb is enough for a teacher to call the sentence passive.  But I’ve seen pairs like the following treated as active and passive respectively:
> 
> Jack gave Marie a ring.
> Marie received a ring from Jack.
> 
> In the second sentence, Marie is Patient, not Agent, and passive subjects are also typically patients, so any sentence with a Patient as subject is called passive and marked wrong, as well as wrongly.
> 
> Herb
> 
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