The passive voice strikes back

Geoffrey K Pullum commemorates 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice: “What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't… The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is… often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn... English grammar… is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.”  Too many good bits to quote; well worth a read.