Peter,
The passive examples we see as examples always look like
misunderstood passives. Your passive here--"was
motivated"-- doesn't look like those passives at all.
I think that teachers should ask, "Is this the most
effective subject (or topic?)" --not "Why is this
passive?"
Martha
I've always suspected that the
anti-passive prejudice was motivated primarily by a desire to avoid
seeming "passive." Too bad we didn't call it something
else . . .
Peter Adams
On Mar 7, 2008, at 2:05 PM, Edgar
Schuster wrote:
Craig may well be right about Orwell's sentiments;
however, Orwell himself near the end of his essay offers a set of six
"rules" (the word is his). His fourth rule is
"Never use the passive where you can use the active."
He doesn't say "where you can use the active" but not the
passive. But he uses passives in four of the first 15
sentences of "Politics," and it's not at all difficult to
substitute actives for each them.
Hurrah for Craig's "we need a more functional orientation to
language so that choice can be built on something more than personal
or group prejudice."
Ed Schuster
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