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Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice? |
Date: |
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:30:54 -0000 |
User-agent: |
tin/1.6.2-20030910 ("Pabbay") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.11-RELEASE (i386)) |
> 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).
;-)
- emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Xah Lee, 2010/12/08
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Uday Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?,
Alan Mackenzie <=
- RE: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Drew Adams, 2010/12/09
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Sean Sieger, 2010/12/09
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, ken, 2010/12/10
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Russ P., 2010/12/09
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, David Combs, 2010/12/08
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/08
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Pascal J. Bourguignon, 2010/12/08
Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Bruce Stephens, 2010/12/08
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