Agreed with your main thrust. Additionally, you touch glancingly on some points I want to highlight.
Some scientists write their journal articles in passive voice. It’s not as if the articles are being written by no one, with no one to blame
Right. And your sentence suggests the scientists are to blame.
Contrast 1b: “Some journal editors publish only articles in passive voice*.”
Those sentences might describe the same present world, but they make different predictions. #1 implicitly predicts that a scientist can write a journal article “in the active voice”, while #1b explicitly predicts that they often can’t (because the relevant journals’ editors might not publish an article “in the active voice”).
So which sentence is correct? Well, maybe you haven’t a clue, and it’s beside your point. Maybe your point really is that “Journal articles are often written in passive voice.”
That is, sometimes one obscures agency because one genuinely isn’t sure who the agent is, and believes it’s better to be vague than to be misleading. There’s a legitimate difference between obscuring something known and obscuring something obscure.
Arguably, the real fallacy underlying all of this is the improperly excluded middle. If there were only two ways to write—identifying agency, or using the passive voice—then “avoid the passive voice!” would be equivalent to “identify the agent!”, albeit longer. But there aren’t, and it isn’t.
What does an “alternative justice process” do?
The problem here is entirely different.
“I subjected the unreliable elements to an alternate justice process” doesn’t obscure the subject, but it still points away, rather than pointing at. The sentence asserts that whatever I used is a justice process, and isn’t a standard one, but it doesn’t actually say what I did. And it asserts that whoever I used it on was an element, and wasn’t reliable, but doesn’t actually say what it was.
This is a common way of pretending to say something without actually saying anything. It raises the question: do I not know what I’m talking about, or am I just refusing to say?
Incidentally, Avoid the passive voice! has the same problem. There are LOTS of ways to avoid the passive voice, most of which don’t accomplish your goal. Presumably you mean “Identify the agent!”… so why not say that?
I perhaps should write “with obscured agency” here, as per sniffjoy’s entirely accurate comment. But making two corrections at the same time seems the greater sin, so I rely on scarequotes instead.
That’s a different perspective of the English language, quite philosophical actually, I never thought about a language that way. I’ll bring this up to my sat tutoring colleagues and see what they have to say about it.
Agreed with your main thrust. Additionally, you touch glancingly on some points I want to highlight.
Some scientists write their journal articles in passive voice. It’s not as if the articles are being written by no one, with no one to blame
Right. And your sentence suggests the scientists are to blame.
Contrast 1b: “Some journal editors publish only articles in passive voice*.”
Those sentences might describe the same present world, but they make different predictions. #1 implicitly predicts that a scientist can write a journal article “in the active voice”, while #1b explicitly predicts that they often can’t (because the relevant journals’ editors might not publish an article “in the active voice”).
So which sentence is correct? Well, maybe you haven’t a clue, and it’s beside your point. Maybe your point really is that “Journal articles are often written in passive voice.”
That is, sometimes one obscures agency because one genuinely isn’t sure who the agent is, and believes it’s better to be vague than to be misleading. There’s a legitimate difference between obscuring something known and obscuring something obscure.
Arguably, the real fallacy underlying all of this is the improperly excluded middle. If there were only two ways to write—identifying agency, or using the passive voice—then “avoid the passive voice!” would be equivalent to “identify the agent!”, albeit longer. But there aren’t, and it isn’t.
What does an “alternative justice process” do?
The problem here is entirely different.
“I subjected the unreliable elements to an alternate justice process” doesn’t obscure the subject, but it still points away, rather than pointing at. The sentence asserts that whatever I used is a justice process, and isn’t a standard one, but it doesn’t actually say what I did. And it asserts that whoever I used it on was an element, and wasn’t reliable, but doesn’t actually say what it was.
This is a common way of pretending to say something without actually saying anything. It raises the question: do I not know what I’m talking about, or am I just refusing to say?
Incidentally, Avoid the passive voice! has the same problem. There are LOTS of ways to avoid the passive voice, most of which don’t accomplish your goal. Presumably you mean “Identify the agent!”… so why not say that?
I perhaps should write “with obscured agency” here, as per sniffjoy’s entirely accurate comment. But making two corrections at the same time seems the greater sin, so I rely on scarequotes instead.
That’s a different perspective of the English language, quite philosophical actually, I never thought about a language that way. I’ll bring this up to my sat tutoring colleagues and see what they have to say about it.