ABSTRACT

At the CSIRO in Canberra, one section of the Personnel Management Manual admonishes administrators to avoid the use of the passive tense in their writing. As a writing consultant, I find what I suspect the author means poor advice—the passive is after all an important resource for organizing Themes in the development of an effective text. As a linguist, I find the advice simply amusing—because there is no such thing as a passive tense. There are present, past and future tenses, and active and passive voices. Presumably the would-be prescriptive grammarian who worked on that section of the manual intended the passive voice. But as the manual stands, the advice, poor though it is, does not really make sense.