sophisticated readers appears like emperor's new clothes failing to hide rather bare content.
Frequent use of the passive voice also creates weak writing. In the passive voice, the main action of the sentence is done to the main noun; in the active voice, by contrast, the main noun of the sentence does the main action. William Strunk and E. B. White in The Elements of Style provide two sentences stating the same idea to contrast the active and the passive voices:
ACTIVE VOICE: "I shall always remember my first visit to Boston."
PASSIVE VOICE: "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me."
Like nominalizations, the passive voice weakens writing by making it wordier and less action-oriented-we see the state of being remembered instead of the deed of remembering. The passive voice changes the natural order of thought, making the sentence convoluted and indirect. As with any "rule" of writing, situations will arise in which using the passive voice is necessary, but these exceptions should be kept to a minimum.
Your writing will lose appeal while losing gravity if you do not choose your words with precision. A classic instance of this effect occurred during the 2004 presidential campaign when, in the midst of much conversation in Washington about "regime change" in Iraq, John Kerry said that it was time for "regime change" in the United States. His remark touched off a firestorm in the press; "regime" does not simply mean administration or leadership, but rather a type or system of government. "Regime change" in the United States would mean deposing the president, dissolving Congress, tearing up the Constitution, and rebuilding the government from scratch. Not only did Kerry's gaffe distract his audience from his real message, but it also showed he used the English language as incompetently as his notoriously inarticulate opponent.
Many cases of imprecision arise not from denotation (a word's definition) but from connotation, a word's emotional charge. My high school English teacher would point out that no one ever says, "The stench of her perfume delighted me" or "The aroma of the garbage nauseated me." Both "stench" and "aroma" are synonyms for "smell," but we all know, almost by second nature, that the former is a negative term and the latter is a positive term. Sometimes this second nature fails us. When I tutored at the University of Maryland Writing Center as an undergraduate, a student wrote in her graduate school application essay, referring
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