

The passive voice is a hoax $100 if you can find a journal that requires it. - AllenDowney
http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2012/04/passive-voice-is-hoax.html

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dalke
I don't think that was ever the requirement. I can't even imagine text written
only in that form. There's a nearly complete lack of general understanding of
what 'passive voice' means, and if you told someone to rewrite an essay to use
only passive, I'm pretty sure the result would have non-passive sentences in
them. (See <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3876> for the failure of a
recent attempt.)

I think the requirement was that people should not use the first person
pronoun. Consider this 1968 commentary in JAMA, <http://jama.ama-
assn.org/content/203/4/283.extract> : "When a psychiatric journal published an
article in which the author used the first person singular throughout, the
editors apologized in a footnote for this departure from "normal" journal
practice."

Those who didn't ignore the requirement responded by using the passive voice,
as in "the temperature was measured", or circumlocutions like "the authors
measured the temperature". People saw a side-effect - passive voice - and
thought that that was part of the 'impersonal' writing style of science.

