June 10, 2005

Passive Voice Applauded

To the Editor:

William Germano finds it ironic that academics warn their students off the passive voice while peppering their own writing with that construction ("Passive Is Spoken Here," The Chronicle Review, April 22). And he celebrates the fact that The Aeneid and Moby-Dick begin with the active voice. But Melville begins Billy Budd with a passive, and -- pace Virgil -- condemning the passive voice is a 20th-century phenomenon. Before the early 1900s, to echo the opening

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