Why passive voice in corporate writing is a good thing

The active voice is for braggarts, whiners, and finger-pointers, says B.S. Reiter, the nom de plume of a recovering corporate editor

The passive voice is as well suited to business as it is to science. Scientists use the passive voice because they write about situations where the action is more important than the agent. Tectonic plates and subatomic particles don’t move the way they do because they want to or because something or someone wants them to—they move that way because that’s just the way things are.

You want to create the same impression about business. In almost all cases, the message you want to get across is, “It wasn’t me. That’s just the way things are.” Using the passive voice allows you to:

Let’s say your company has been saving money for years by steadily chipping away at the budget for quality control and now it faces an embarrassing and expensive recall of unsafe products. Squirming out of a situation like this one requires euphemism as much as the passive voice, as in this sentence:

“Product outcomes that were less than optimal are regretted by Buncombe Corporation and are being addressed.”