It depends what you're using it for. As an academic, I used passive voice all the time. My students - well, the department's students - were all taught to write their essays in passive voice, and would be pulled up if personal pronouns appeared. That's standard in UK/Irish universities. Academic articles and books are also written in passive voice.
(I just realised that most of that paragraph is written in passive voice!).
I was actually taken aback the first time I tried out Word's grammar checker and it told me that my sentence was in passive voice and should be changed. Since I was writing an academic article at the time, I pretty much told it to get lost.
And that's when I first decided that Bill Gates knows nothing about grammar.
With writing fiction, I've discovered that active is much better than passive. I've been persuaded that wherever possible I should use active verbs, use pronouns, show who is performing an action, rather than the action being performed.
Though, even in fiction, I can see the place for passive voice: suppose you're writing a mystery or thriller, then I could see using passive, for example with this:
Ahead of them, though there was no-one in sight, the door opened slowly with a loud, rasping creak.Who's opening the door? Well, that's part of the mystery. So there's not going to be a person in there performing the action. Passive works best.
Wendy
