I think this advice is misunderstood -- part of Orwell's advice here is that you can't always use the active voice. Not, at least, without inflicting worse injuries to the language than with the passive. I read Orwell here as saying that the passive is often used to conceal agency when the active would be both more honest and more natural, not that we should never use the passive.

> I read Orwell here as saying that the passive is often used to conceal agency when the active would be both more honest and more natural, not that we should never use the passive.

Mistakes were made.

"Mistakes were made by Jeff and later Cindy" uses the passive and is quite clear about agency.

"A bomb exploded near midtown" uses the active but tells us nothing about who was responsible.

If we care about clarity of agency, we should look for it, not poor proxies.

You're responding to a much broader claim than anyone here is actually making. The point is not that the passive voice always conceals agency. The point is that people often use the passive voice in order to conceal agency.

I don't think I am responding to the claim you think I am.

If we want agency to be clearly attributed, we will do better to ask whether agency is clearly attributed than to ask if the passive voice is used. It's what we care about, and it is a determination people are often better at making in the first place.

Fair enough! Though I also don't think anyone was claiming that listening for the passive voice is the best or only way to identify when someone is dodging responsibility.

I don't think anyone was claiming that listening for the passive voice is the only way to identify when someone is dodging responsibility.

I do think it is being identified (at least) as an important or effective way of noticing when you are being evasive in your own writing - otherwise why is "the passive is often used to conceal agency" even relevant to the question of improving your writing? And I think to that end, asking the more direct question is better.

Stephen Pinker has the following (and more) to say about the passive versus active. From _The Sense of Style_,

“The passive voice, too, has several uses in English. One of them […] is indispensable to classic style: the passive allows the writer to direct the reader’s gaze, like a cinematographer choosing the best camera angle.”

The example he gives -- and I'm sure you can come up with many more -- is,

See that lady with the shopping bag? She's pelting a mime with a zucchini.

versus,

See that mime? He's being pelted with zucchini by the lady with the shopping bag.

And there's this,

“As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has noted, there is nothing wrong with a news report that uses the passive voice to say, ‘Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires.’ The reader does not need to be informed that Bob was flying one of the helicopters.”

This would be why Orwell said to break his rules rather than write something insensible. I think they're best understood as a toolbox for spotting when people are telling us certain kinds of lies. The passive voice is a tool, but it's important to look at why the writer decided to change the camera angle to avoid looking at who actually did the thing.

We certainly don't need to care about the agency for every trivial matter, but we certainly should know when clever 'camera angles' are being used by the author to hide an agent in the shadows.

I interpreted this a a kind of ironic allusion to the kind of writing he was castigating.