I got:
* The report was written yesterday.
* The committee approved the proposal.
* The door was open when I arrived.
* The window was broken during the storm.
* The window was broken when we bought the house.
* Mistakes were made.
* The system is designed to fail safely.
* The results are surprising.
* The patient was examined and released.
* The data suggests the model was trained improperly.
* There were several errors identified in the report.
* The system appears to have been compromised.
I got two of them wrong, though I think "partially passive" is a total cop-out.
I just realized that there's a delightful bit of ambiguity here.
Was the window damaged during the storm (and so the water got onto the carpet), or was the window damaged _by_ the storm?
I've tried to read this sentence so many times. That parenthetical is a doozy.
Pick a random sentence from discussion on tax laws or building an npm package, and they will sound just as ridiculous (or even pompous) to outsiders.
Being so pedantic, and then saying "but I'm not going to use the technical term voice" is particularly off-putting. If this is an article about grammatical pedentry, let's go all the way. Otherwise, the author should focus on providing useful advice.
"The bus blew up" is a perfectly active clause. "The bus" is the subject, it did its own blowing-up.
"The bus was blown up" is a passive clause. "The bus" is the object, some unnamed entity acted on the bus.
English lacks a formal middle and there is a good deal of established literature on verbal aspects where the subject is not really the agent called "ergative".
There is utility in comparing "the bus exploded", perhaps unclear as to the agent, but language is not an agent game. It's trying to convey information, which is clear enough in these cases.
You could simply say "You must be clear who did what" and it would be as good an advice as any, but people have to shove in "passive" into the advice, which serves no purpose and just makes things more confusing.
Is that passive?
If you think that couldn't happen, you never rode in my 2011 Audi A6 that blew up on the Ike, and that I parked in a CPD parking lot, flames jumping out from under the hood, and walked away from like a fucking Batman villain, clicking the key fob just to hear it go "beep-boop-beep" one last time.
But this particular article rubs me the wrong way, for whatever reason. It just seems to miss the point.
Click around, you're in for a treat.
1. Slavic languages have several ways to construct "impersonal sentences" that can be used to describe the results of actions or being in a certain state without mentioning the actors. They sound completely natural and are used in common spoken speech.
2. Passive does sound more complicated and marked in English. Descriptions often need to use either passive voice or "fake" subjects (e.g.: "It was raining").
2. In Chinese, true passive voice ("被/叫/...") is extremely uncommon and is used mostly for negative things like "was hit by a car". Some linguists even call it an "adversity marker". And for neutral things like "The package was delivered yesterday" typical constructions look more like "The package is yesterday-delivered", with the "yesterday-delivered" construction acting almost like an adjective.
It is understood by basically everybody that there are two different things meant by passive vs. active: on one hand, the technical grammatical distinction, and on the other, the broader spirit of the phrase. Edge cases are very easy to construct: passive clauses where the agency is well-identified, and active clauses where responsibility is totally diffuse. This technical clarification is needed by nobody, because a rule-of-thumb like "avoid passive voice" is meant to be used holistically, not literally.
At the end, a parting shot is fired at George Orwell and E.B. White. Naturally, the superior intellect of the author of TFA is driven home.
The headlines read "Hamas terrorists fire rockets at Israel, killing tens" and the other headlines read "Missiles were shot at Gaza" and "Thousands of Palestinians were killed" [corrected]. Who did that? Nobody knows!
"Thousands of Palestinians killed" is in passive. "Rockets were fired at Israel" would be as well.