"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. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. 'At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard' is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
"* 'There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground' has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
"* 'It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had' also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
"* 'The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired' is presumably fingered as passive because of 'impaired,' but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. 'Become' doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that 'A new edition became issued by the publishers' is not grammatical.)"
I agree with Pullum that one of the big problems of Strunk and White as a guide to writing is its nearly complete ignorance of discourse structure or any other level of analysis beyond looking at single sentences.
I don't want to comment on the grammatical correctness, being a non-native English speaker, but on the subject of the passive in general I can safely say I sure wouldn't mind some code to screen it out of our bug reporting system. Quite often the primary response is "The reason this is happening is because of X. X should be modified to trap this" or some such. Invariably, I have to enquire "so who will fix X and when are they likely to do it"? The passive construction has been used to mean "I will fix X now", "I would fix X but I am not going to", "I am addressing this to Joe, and I naturally assume that he will understand that he is supposed to fix X along the lines I described".
The issue here is that people are evading responsibility, not that they are using the passive voice to do it (though the passive voice is notoriously handy for this purpose).
No, there is no conscious evasion of responsibility. The person who writes the response thinks they are saying "I will fix it" or "I am telling X to fix it" and the passive voice is consistent with what they think they are saying. It is just hard for anyone else to figure that out without being mindreaders.
This is particularly common in people with academic background, as the passive voice is often encouraged in scientific writing.
Pullum's article is so thoroughly substantiated that your comment suggests you didn't read it.
It explains things that have bugged me for years. Where did I get these vague ideas about split infinitives, beginning sentences with "However", and "which" vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down versions of Strunk and White, who turn out to have been just plain wrong.
My sense of my own native language just got clearer.
Edit: it's possible that the harm was done more by over-rigid promulgation of S&W's rules than by S&W itself, but I still think that Pullum's phrase "unhappy state of grammatical angst" hits the nail on the head.
Where did I get these vague ideas about split infinitives, beginning sentences with "However", and "which" vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down versions of Strunk and White, who turn out to have been just plain wrong.
Actually, many of those bugaboos of English teachers in schools long precede the publication of Strunk's book as edited by White. Strunk would have learned his hang-ups from teachers who mindlessly passed on hang-ups they learned from still earlier teachers.
The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right?
Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.
The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.
Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.
Nonsense.