One piece of advice new writers hear a lot is to avoid the passive voice. It’s right there in Strunk & White, rule number 14: “Use the active voice.” What many citers of this rule ignore is that they go on to say that, while the active voice is more “direct and vigorous” than passive:

This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.

In English, linguistic gender and natural gender are the same thing. Words aren’t masculine or feminine—the people or things they represent are. Even cases where inanimate objects are given a gender, like calling a ship “she”, are a form of anthropromorphization, not a grammatical feature of the word.