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Q&A Why do many manuals and technical documents seem to prefer passive voice?

Speaking only from my own experience, passive voice is often a last resort. I write a lot of user guide material, and my company's style guide discourages using passive phrasing, but even more stro...

posted 7y ago by topicref‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T08:01:47Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33469
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar topicref‭ · 2019-12-08T08:01:47Z (almost 5 years ago)
Speaking only from my own experience, passive voice is often a last resort. I write a lot of user guide material, and my company's style guide discourages using passive phrasing, but even more strongly discourages using second-person pronouns. So while it may feel more natural for me to write "You can access the setting in the widget," I may have to use "The setting can be accessed in the widget" instead, assuming I can't figure out another way around it.

I suspect this is true of other widely-used style guides as well.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-01-24T13:01:19Z (almost 7 years ago)
Original score: 5