Don't Be Afraid of the Passive Voice

I love books about punctuation and usage—Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed are two of my favorite books, along with the new edition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (winsomely illustrated by Maira Kalman).  Plus, the only instance of my ever doubting I was going to be a librarian had to do...