Perhaps we could ask those who are either unsubscribing or considering unsubscribing why they are doing so. Maybe many recent subscribers out there have expectations about a grammar listserv that are not being met; if so, let's hear about them. Or perhaps it's just a matter of summer vacation and crowded mailboxes. Bob Yates was right to correct me a few days ago when I was thinking about the passive as something people can correct easily because it's an issue of easily observable word order. It clearly requires knowledge about some core grammar. But the discussion has raised questions for me about when, and why, --in an ideal world, educationally speaking--we should teach the passive. Students don't need to know about it to write acceptably and comfortably in formal standard English (I'm working off of our proposed scope and sequence objectives here). That is, writing a passive sentence is not a mistake in usage or an error in conventional terms--and we wouldn't want to create the impression that it is, would we? (In our culture, it is impossible to talk about passive and an active anything without connoting values--active good, passive bad.) So knowing the passive seems related to the second proposed 3S goal--for students to have the ability to analyze grammatical structure and to show knowledge of the relationship between grammatical structure and text-level issues. Okay, so students should know about the passive to better understand rhetorical and stylistic options. But at what grade levels is it appropriate to learn the passive for these reasons? Senior high/college? or is it too late then? Elementary? But is it necessary then? It seems to me the issue is a pretty good example of the need to sort out, and the difficulty in doing so, what sentence grammar issues should be taught in what order. How and when do we teach a point about sentence structure that involves the words "active" and "passive" to millions of young people and show them succesfully that it's a matter of style, not of "don't"? Brock Haussamen [log in to unmask] Raritan Valley Community College, NJ