Is active voice always the right answer?

I know several writers (usually ones who came into the profession from an engineering or scientific lab environment) who maintain that passive voice is the ONLY way to write technical documentation. "Personal" pronouns, they claim, have no place in impersonal technical documents.

Of course, those of us who went to school for technical writing probably had the opposite drilled into us. Active voice is good! Passive voice is evil! I actually had them personified as super heroes/villains in my mind at one point in my education. The reasoning was that active voice provided a clear "doer" and (less obviously) it removed liability from the technical writer by assigning tasks to specific people (while passive might not clearly state who should do what, which might result in an unsafe work environment depending on the task at hand). Oh, and active voice is a lot more engaging and easier to read, since the sentences are structured in the way English speakers are normally taught to process them (no mental back flips required!).

However, in the real world, while writers should strive for active voice whenever possible, passive voice definitely has its place. I've found two circumstances where I use it often: maintaining focus on a subject and describing errors.

Passive voice lets you put the object of the sentence at the forefront. So if you're writing about a computer disk, for example, "The user should then take the computer disk out of the disk drive" can become "The computer disk should then be taken out of the disk drive." While we have no "doer" in this sentence, we do maintain focus on the disk. (Yeah, it's a simplistic example, but off-the-cuff examples have never been my strong point. In this case, I'd probably just write "Take the computer disk out of the disk drive.")

Passive voice also lets you remove blame from your user when you describe error messages. Why bother? Well, users buy products and thus pay your salary. You want them to feel comfortable with the product, not skittish. Thus, any problem they have shouldn't be described like it's their fault (even if it is). "If you remove the disk while the program is installing, the computer will crash." Yeah, stupid! (That's the message you're delivering there.) Whereas "If the disk is removed while the program is running..." focuses on the action, not the person doing it.

Anyway, just some thoughts on active vs. passive voice. Discuss...