Too many people who yatter on about “you should never use the passive voice” don’t even know what it is. Many have confused it with the verb to be, which grammarians so sweetly call “the copulative” and which doesn’t even have a passive voice. And so they go around telling us not to use the verb to be! Most verbs are more exact and colorful than that one, but you tell me how else Hamlet should have started his soliloquy, or how Jehovah should have created light.
