April 22, 2005
Passive Is Spoken Here
Silver spoons, real ones anyway, owe a lot of their charm to the hallmarks on the back of the stem. Academic writing has its own system of validation, its own hallmarks, and one is the passive voice. This is a strange development, considering how vigilant we are about overuse of the passive when we teach writing, and how insistent writing guides can be on this point. "Whenever you come across a passive in your writing, recast the sentence with an active verb instead." The examples tend to
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Peer Review
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Academic Assets
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Teaching
