From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2010 18:48:46 +0000 (UTC) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <i8d7ie$dro$1@colin2.muc.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 322eca01-3bf5-4078-9439-57ba9503afc6@k1g2000prl.googlegroups.com
> For technical writing, I favor active voice where appropriate, but in
> some cases I think passive voice is preferable. Consider, for example,
> "The parameters were perturbed, and the test was run again." I could
> rewrite that in active voice as "We varied the parameters and ran the
> test again." But what if there is no "we", only "I"? Then I would have
> to write "I varied the parameters and ran the test again." That just
> doesn't strike me as good style for a technical paper. The point is not
> who did it but that it was done. What difference would it make if a
> monkey did it, as long as he did it right?
Maybe the parameters might be less perturbed at being varied by a monkey
than by your good self. Who knows?
> Russ P.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
;-)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-10-04 18:48 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-10-03 3:06 emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice? Xah Lee
2010-10-03 11:14 ` Uday Reddy
2010-10-03 19:29 ` Russ P.
2010-10-03 19:38 ` Jay Belanger
2010-10-03 20:50 ` David Kastrup
2010-10-03 22:57 ` Russ P.
2010-10-04 18:48 ` Alan Mackenzie [this message]
2010-10-05 0:53 ` Russ P.
[not found] ` <ias317$dtr$2@reader1.panix.com>
2010-11-04 19:22 ` Stefan Monnier
2010-11-04 20:10 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
2010-12-09 17:48 ` Drew Adams
2010-12-10 1:16 ` Sean Sieger
2010-12-10 16:04 ` ken
2010-10-03 12:47 ` Bruce Stephens
2010-10-03 22:07 ` B. T. Raven
2010-10-04 6:52 ` David Kastrup
2010-10-05 4:02 ` B. T. Raven
2010-11-03 16:34 ` David Combs
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