I'm a big fan of Orwell, and yes he "wrote like a good journalist," since he was a journalist. Some people would say the world's best :) Gotta say, I haven't heard a whole lot of people championing the passive voice! If you have an idea to communicate, it strikes me as strange that you would want to leave out information - which is my biggest problem with the passive voice. "Is rumored to be" is a shifty way a writer can avoid telling you who started the rumor. I find it depressing to read all the comments on this post. I hoped there would be more intellectual seriousness on HN, and I have big doubts about how mature a person can be if they haven't gotten over the desire to write like a grown-up, instead of actually conveying a point in a simple way. I'm not a Paul Graham fanboy, but he couldn't be more right in this case.

Here's a great piece from Geoffrey Pullum (fairly pre-eminent linguist) on the passive voice: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf

I think the discussion on this article has been very good, actually, and I'm not sure phrases like "intellectual seriousness" really add much to the debate.

"Intellectual seriousness" is a bad choice of words. Sorry, my irritation got the better of me. And to be more charitable to you, while I think writers should avoid the passive voice, I also don't believe there is any rule so important that one can never break it. The more important thing should always be to get one's point across.

That essay makes some good points. In my previous comment I was thinking mainly of sentences like "Mistakes were made."