The importance of using the active voice cannot be emphasized enough.

It appears my idea was stolen by you.

Have you been upset by this?

I suspect about 50% of us came here to make that post. I first came across it from a list of 'fumblerules', I think collected by William Safire circa 1980, that included :

Don't use no double negatives.

Sentences should a verb.

One will never have used the future perfect in one's entire life.

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read and figure out.

I've told you a thousand times : avoid hyperbole.

(plus quite a bit more not currently coming to mind)

It's a pity English doesn't really have reflexive forms, found in other languages, that substitute for the passive, because:

the Xyzzy driver error handling fixes itself to avoid a NULL pointer dereference

would also deal neatly with the shortage of kernel maintainers.

> the Xyzzy driver error handling fixes itself...

Self-modifying code?

> the Xyzzy driver error handling fixes itself...

Self-modifying code? .....Spoobistle

You might like to realise if you have been paying attention and learning about all of these new fangled and quantum entangling things that El Reg is freely presenting to you daily for both Day and 0Day Trading, the situation for publishing has moved on and into the surreal realms of inhabitable existentialism with *SMARTR AI Technology exercising Global Command Head Quarter Control to entertain and exploit ITs Almighty Alien Advantage, the Resultant Product of its AIMastery and Relevant Field Utilisation of Remote Universal Virtual Language Leverage.

* ..... SMARTR Mentoring Analysis Reporting Titanic Research for Advanced IntelAIgents

Out of interest, is there a technical term for a pointer that points to itself?

Pictures of a cat chasing its own tail come to mind...

What (in C) would be its type?

A pointer that points to itself?

As an English teacher with some experience in several non-eurocentric languages, for years I have searched for a word that refers to itself.

I've never found one.

An appropriate label or technical term for a self-pointing pointer may to be in the same category as technical terms or labels such as 'Easter Bunny' and 'Tooth Fairy'.

Mom noted that when I point my index finger at someone else, I am the 'Pointer', and that then I have three more fingers in my palm that are pointing at me.

Fortunately, perhaps, absolutely none of the words are that to which they refer.

Point taken.

"Linux contributors told to sort out their grammar lest they be actively corrected."

We see what you did there.

That is something up with which you should not put

Or even: That is something up with which should not be put.

So there you have it, folks. Simple ambiguity-killing declarative sentences or imperative phrases – you can't beat 'em. ®

I couldn’t agree more. Such makes even the most complex of novel tasks so much easier for a great many more to clearly not misunderstand and then subsequently serially misinform and disenfranchise future readers and present viewers a’listening to current thoughts one might consider worthy of a wider knowing and absolutely fabulous world wide web sharing.

That was nicely put!

The suggestion could have been made clearer by providing an example.

He did provide examples. Read the source thread before complaining.

Whooooooooooooooooosh.

It's strange to whine about the passive voice in Linux documentation and comments while the systemd cancer goes untreated.

>>systemd cancer goes untreated

AFAIK systemd != kernel and therefore not Linus' parish... so why would Linus comment on systemd when talking about kernel pull requests?

… my particle is hanging ever deeper. Am I no longer allowed to contribute to the Kernel?

Shirley, you mean your particles..

There was this wild night in Mombassa….

Did it invlove a chair with a hole in the middle, two bricks and a "urologist" with bad eyesight?

Never got that far. Woody Allen burst out of a TV screen and shot him.

I see we have the same health insurance!!

But it is certainly good to know that the really important matters are being taken care of in Linux land. Such as ensuring that Gen-Z developers are/will be able to actually understand commit logs... Simple English rulz, comrade!

"slipping into the pluperfect subjunctive mood, a place of regrets where few happy things dwell."

So true! I don't think I've ever heard someone use this when they were happy about the state of affairs.

Passive voice is considered polite in German.

The earlier DVB specifications were all written in English by German speakers.

I have had a Spanish guy argue with me about a passage in one of our manuals that was copied directly from a DVB spec.

Aaaargh!

Etc etc.

When I write english text in MS Word, the corrector always warn of the passive voice.... how could I imagina that was Linus behind that!

As my mother language is Spanish, I can only say: My overcraft is full of eels

Se siente tu dolor.

And was educated during the period in which it was considered unnecessary to teach English grammar, as "kids just pick it up".

I therefore have no idea what this is about.

At school we asked our teachers for a lesson in grammar. We were told they weren't allowed to teach it. An entire generation left to learn grammar from MS-Word auto correct. What could possibly go wrong?

I'm American. Here, grammar became considered unnecessary somewhere around the mid-1960s, during which time I was busy being born. The only time I was taught anything about English grammar was when learning other languages, and seeing their overlap with English. (Which was interesting, but I must admit that I mostly just "picked it up".)

And was educated during the period in which it was considered unnecessary to teach English grammar, as "kids just pick it up"

Colonial but the same applied. I learnt (English) grammar only when I studied French in high school. :)

Unfortunately kids don't just pick it up which renders much of their later written communication illiterate - ranging from unintended ambiguity to utter impenetrablity.

I had to wait until middle age to learn a practical definition of a sentence and then from a non native English speaker - basically that a sentence expresses a single coherent thought or idea. Forget about finite verbs etc ;) By this definition the absence of coherent thought rather precludes the construction of comprehensible sentences.

The passive is maliciously used to conceal the omission of the implicit by whom , by duck shovers and responsibility avoiders or shifters.

I have just been threatened with a permanent ban from Wikipedia for "vandalism". My sin was to correct a small grammatical error by moving a closing parenthesis five words to the right 1 .

But then, Wikipedians are one of the weirdest cults on the internet and I shouldn't really be surprised.

1 To paraphrase, I changed "Sydney (who had one arm), but could ride a bicycle ..." to "Sydney (who had one arm, but could ride a bicycle) ..." . The horror, the horror.

> It creates a lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency

That's often the point, see "mistakes were made". I sometimes do this to avoid pointing in public at the person who did a fuckup.

It has a lot of room for improvement

The most prominent difference between Torvalds' two example sentences – (1) 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' vs. (2) 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..' – is not that between passive and active, but that of the subject, actually a question of meaning. In (1), the acting subject implicitly is an unnamed person, a someone who did the fixing, in (2) it is the pull request with its code that does the fixing. Simply transforming (1) into active voice would make it something like 'In this pull request, we fixed the Xyzzy driver error handling to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' – which wouldn't be that much better than the original, either ;-)

Alone worth the price of admission if there were any such impost. ;)

Linus is Finnish? No?

I vaguely recall Finland is/was pretty keen on Latin including web sites entirely in Latin which might explain a few things.

Linus is a Finnish speaking Swedish as mother tongue.

Genius idea icon ====>

How's about someone develop an English-like programming language◈ for writing them commit messages? You'll have a standard library of messages and plug in the parameters. (That way there won't be any arguments). So you'll write your comment in whichever dialect you like, hit compile, and it translates that into good English.

◈ In fact, it can output Standard Klingon for all I care.

As far as I know, American schools do still teach grammar. But America is a very large country, and practices may vary from school to school even within a school district, let alone across state lines.

Feelings had been expressed that humour might be found in a headline formulated with this wording.

*25 years in local government

As long as you don't start writing in iambic pentameter then we'll be OK

"How to write a git commit message"

https://cbea.ms/git-commit/