Dear Larry,
with my limited experience as an author and editor of scholarly texts
(monographs as well as proceedings of conferences) I wish to support
Morten's view. I think it is better not to convert every passive voice
unearthed by grep, but rather check the text for readability. As
Morten's example of the file being subject to change ("the file changes"
vs. "the file is changed") vividly demonstrates there should not be an
all-out operation applied to every instance of passive voice.
Do you have a deadline? If it is not too urgent, I'll be happy to go
through the text, but this will have to wait until the second half of
November.
Best regards,
Oliver.
On 03/11/2026 03:09, Larry Kollar wrote:
As I’ve gone through UTP and started modernizing,
and finding (or all too often, recreating) lost utilities,
I noticed several quirks that bothered me—overuse
of “will” and “simply,” and lots and lots of passive voice.
I fixed those that I noticed as I went through the book,
but obviously missed a lot more.
I finally decided to take a more systemic approach. Maybe
it was when I was going through the regular expressions
section that I thought of it:
$ grep -En '(is|are|was|were)( not)? [a-z]+ed’ *.t | wc -l
1057
$
This is in the “2.0 (UTP Revisited)” branch. As the main
branch returns 1348, I’ve made a dent. The thing is,
most lines matched contain more than one match;
VScodium says there are 2090 matches total.
Of course, this isn’t the total number of passive constructs:
this doesn’t catch any patterns with a line break, and there
are other passive constructs that I’ve run across. But this
is a start. Difficulty ranges from deleting a word or two, to
moving a few things around, to completely rewriting the entire
sentence. Often, you’ll notice the active construct is one or two
words shorter than the original; other times, (especially with
the rewrites) it might be a few words longer. I didn’t think to
do an initial word count, and it doesn’t matter anyway since
we’re adding new material (including a new chapter on using
Markdown and XML with *roff).
Anyway, is anyone interested in picking up one or more files
to scan and fix? (Feel free to comment on my modernization
attempts as well.) I’d started with app[a-c].t, so I’ll finish them
up and tackle any chapters left unclaimed.
Thanks much!
— Larry
--
Dr. Oliver Corff
Mail:[email protected]
