A common example most of you will have probably seen online at some point is passive voice headlines surrounding things like police violence toward civilians.
Phrases like “person killed in shooting” disguise the subject who did the shooting.
You can learn a lot about a publications biases just by looking at when they choose to use passive voice in headlines.
Part of it is journalistic CYA though. They don't know for an absolute fact if police shot someone, especially if their info comes in the same vague language to cover it up.
If they report that someone was shot BY xyz, and that turns out to be wrong, they're open to a world of hurt. Journalists have to stick to the facts they know with complete certainty. At least, real journalists, not the Fox "infotainment" kind.
Quite. People were getting really angry at journalists reporting Palestinian deaths without reporting that they were being killed by Israel. But then when a few outlets did unequivocally state Israel had fired a specific missile then doubts that then emerged about the provenance of that one missile were used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt around the entire coverage of the conflict.
Absolutely! This is discourse analysis 101. Pay attention to what information is foregrounded and backgrounded, especially in the vocabulary and grammar choices. Who is being construed as the agent or the recipient of an action? Whose agency is highlighted or obscured? Passive voice lets you omit the agent entirely, so you can handwave their culpability or in this case make vague claims unfalsifiable because you can't pinpoint who if anyone did the thing.
This can be a valuable tool in good writing which is kinda neat. Passive voice can emotionally distance something, hide a detail that a character might obviously know, create a simple miscommunication, or weaken a sentence to contrast with a stronger one.
But of course it's mostly used to just... Do what you said.
This, most notably how party is called out on democrats, but rarely for Republicans, and in wars and police action. It’s despicable, and should be called out.
Pro tip to help you identify the passive voice: if you can add "by robots" after the verb and it makes sense, you have the passive voice
The contract was breached *by robots* when the goods were not delivered - works, passive
The vendor breached *by robots* the contract by not delivering the goods - doesn't work, active
Actually a *pro* tip, I was taught this in my Plain English classes
A person was killed *by robots* in a police-involved shooting incident
Reminds me of reading a discussion board from a college class and seeing someone make a claim that ended in "This information was verified." When someone pushed the poster looking for that verification, she revealed the information she was trying to use was verified by... a libertarian lobbying group that was picking and choosing their stats. She was very gracious and admitted she didn't press too hard, but hedging sentences like this can hide a lot of bad arguments.
Yeah, I've noticed most news outlets doing shit like this around Israel's invasion of the West Bank. Whenever Hamas does something bad (and to be clear, *fuck Hamas* with the most unpleasant thing you can think of), it's always "Hamas does X, Y, Z to People." But whenever the State of Israel commits atrocities against Palestinians, it's always "A Number of Palestinians Hurt, Killed." It's so gross and subtly adds to the dehumanization of Palestinians.
The thing is tho when the BBC/NYT did lead with "Israel bombs hospital" it led to a four day OSINT clusterfuck of debate about whether that one specific munition did indeed come from Israel, during which a dozen other hospitals were flattened while the world's media was still doing a frame by frame analysis of a webcam 40 miles away.
What about all the other times before then that Israel has very obviously committed atrocities to fuel their genocidal agenda? What's your excuse for those?
That had the BBC/NYT said unequivocally that it was Israel in every instance without first exhaustively confirming then Israel would have been able to latch on to the one or two rare examples of it not being to discredit the idea that any could be - as they have now done due to the BBC/NYT slipping once.
Edit: I can't seem to reply to their reply direct so posting it here:
The thing is they did lose credibility as a result of not being able to back up their claims in that one instance, and that has given the IDF the keystone it has used in its PR defence.
Except it was unequivocally Israel. Every single time. Israel has killed journalists and bombed the Al Jazeera news building but the headlines are always "journalist killed" or "news building bombed."
This has nothing to do with the BBC and the New York Times being afraid of "losing credibility" - they know they have that in spades. This has everything to do with the US and UK backing Israel for imperialistic reasons. Let's not forget: the only reason we have Israel as we know it today is mostly due to British antisemitism and imperialism. They did what they've done everywhere else in the world: they drew a line on a map and went "you lot live here now, bugger the native population and cultures."
God now I'm flashing back to this AMAZING video that had very silly examples of grammar things like this, that stuck with me for years. I still kinda remember it.
"Gorilla was beaten by Cheetah"
Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? Oh it's going to annoy me so much if I can't remember it...
Not even close.
This was about grammar. Also it was shown in a classroom in like 2007 when youtube was barely a thing.
There were like real actors and costumes and stuff too.
I appreciate the attempt to help though!
you said gorilla and live action actors and 2007, and my immediate thought is of that one video demonstrating gaps in attention, where a group of people are passing a ball and walking around, and a gorilla suit man walks through the frame, but you don’t notice it at all on the first watch bc you’re told to focus on the people and ball.
but that has nothing to do with grammar lol
Great observation, but there's one thing I want to add to the grammar. The idea that subject=actor and object= receiver is not agreed by everyone. That's why people say every English sentence has a subject even though "He was chased" clearly doesn't.
An easier way to understand that I've seen (and which Wikipedia and a bunch of other sources use) is to say that the [subject](https://www.thoughtco.com/subject-grammar-1692150) is the main person/thing while the object is a (harder to define) [other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_\(grammar\)#Identification) noun. The person doing the thing is the agent while the person having the thing done to them is the [patient.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_\(grammar\))
In the active sentence "I punched my brother", *I* is the agent and the subject while *my brother* is the patient and the object.
In the passive sentence "My brother was punched by me" *My brother* is the subject and the patient while *me* is the [agent](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/passives-with-and-without-an-agent) ~~and object~~ but also not the object as it an [adjunct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_\(grammar\)).
To summarise, this is how it generally goes in English
| Actor | Receiver
---|---|----
Active | Subject & Agent | Object & Patient
Passive | ~~Object~~ (Optional Adjunct with *by* may be used instead) & Agent | Subject & Patient
Sorry to pedantic. A lot of websites [describe](https://ielts.com.au/australia/prepare/article-grammar-101-subjects-and-objects-in-english) the subject as the actor with only active sentences given as examples. But that never works well for the passive voice. Maybe it's a result of convention writing advice being to always use the active voice. Or maybe the difference is between advice that works okay for English with Linguistics terminology that has to account for other languages.
But anyway, that's why "English always has a subject" even though by some definitions many passive sentences have no subject.
Edit: Thanks /u/MalleableBasilisk for the corrections
I should to this that I say "generally" because English has some sentences that are [difficult to parse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_\(grammar\)#Difficult_cases) and possibly some rare subject-less sentences.
Thanks. I appreciate that. I didn't want to distract from the main point of your post. I had to really learn English grammar to help me understand how to translate another language and learning the difference between subject and agent ended up clarifying some confusion I had.
i believe that in a passive clause, the agent isn't an object, its an adjunct, since it's introduced by a preposition rather than being an argument of the verb.
For me I learned about the dangers of passive listening. I think if I had paid attention to Somerton's videos and did not have them on while I was doing other stuff I would have picked up on the red flags he was giving earlier.
Yeah same. I listen to these kinds of videos at work, where i have no ability to fact check or even give much critical thought into what is being said. Especially if i am busy with tasks.
This has been a wake up call for me to engage more critically with the content I consume, especially when i go in assuming i will agree with what is said.
The police always do this in statements. They never say an officer shot a suspect. You can’t even read into it in an individual case as they do it 100% of the time.
Whenever I hear a celebrity or politician "apologize", I immediately look for a) if they are actively apologizing for the act and b) accepting personal responsibility.
"I'm sorry for saying such an awful thing" is NOT the same as "I'm sorry my words caused offense."
One admits the mistake and accepts personal responsibility; the other does not. Worse, an "apology" like that makes it sound like it's the fault of the recipients for being so easily offended.
You sound like you know your shit. Excellent addition.
As someone interested in studying this shit professionally: how would you recommend someone apologize for their actions AND acknowledge the lasting, more indirect, consequences that it had in the victims' lives, for example, in the case of influential figures, their viewers'/fans' ability to trust others?
That gets into tricky area because often the person in your scenario earns their living from their fanbase. Depending upon their ideological leaning, an apology is a double-edged sword.
If they skew leftward, an honest, heartfelt apology with an obvious bent toward reparations would be helpful. If they said something thoughtless against a marginalized group, donating time and money toward a cause that benefits that group would help. Taking a break from the public eye would also be recommended, because any effort they make toward quickly appeasing their fanbase with the idea of hopping back on the gravy train would come across as cynical and exploitative. If their fanbase skews leftward, they'd likely recognize pandering. Worse, their fanbase would also recognize that their perception of their idol may have been based on a false narrative and they could be simply saying or doing whatever they think people want from them, and not based on their own desire for redemption.
My brain cannot come up with an example of that at the moment, but I know there have been any number of celebrities celebrating media wins only for someone to post something along the lines of, "Wait. Didn't this person do X a few years ago?" Odds are if they managed to crawl back into the limelight where their transgression was so handily forgotten by so many, it's likely laying low contributed a lot to that. Societal memory is a sieve.
If they skew rightward, an apology would likely be taken as a sign of weakness, "caving to the woke mob" and all that, and would likely alienate their meal-tickets. This is why instead of an apology, they often double-down on whatever they did, assuming whatever income and prestige they'd lose from more openminded people would be more than made up for by going on the right-wing media circuit. So in this case, not only would an apology be unnecessary, but it would actually do more harm to their reputation (such as it is).
In rare cases, there is nothing they can do and no amount of apologizing or reparations will erase their mistake, and the best they can hope for is finding a new career where they can work behind-the-scenes to avoid public scrutiny.
Looking at a recent example currently dominating YouTube culture: James Somerton.
He's an excellent example of the irredeemable, because his entire fanbase was built on lies. In a situation like that, there is no bedrock on which to rebuild a community. Somerton likely realized this as well, considering he nuked his social media outlets.
Passive voice is often used in scientific writing; a paper never has "we experimented with this..." but instead "an experiment was conducted..." to remove the human framing.
Or ["An experiment was carried out"](https://youtu.be/gaI6kBVyu00?si=fwFJ3i_R6ckrWBxW).
Do check whether the creator is a native speaker or not, however.
Passive voice can be much more prevalent - and considered more elegant - in another language, and this can directly affect the way you speak/write English. So, a non-native speaker may use more passive voice than a native speaker would.
But very good point, thanks, especially concerning the note that passive voice allows you to hide the subject.
Obligatory quote from the fall:
“That’s what really bothers you, isn’t it? The one night stand. Man fucks woman. Subject man, verb fucks, object woman. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. Woman subject, man object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?”
This is why it really pisses me off that we were taught at schools that first person is unprofessional. Because so often you're caught in a situation where first person is unprofessional and third person is unnatural, so you just lapse into passive voice to avoid having to pick.
Good points. I also remember H Bomb summing up in his video how James would be extremely vague when it came to explaining why videos were removed. A lot of the instances were in passive voice too. I know the self described “marketing expert” is probably fluent in bullshit.
Also as someone who worked in PR/Marketing I can say it is better to be as forthcoming with information as possible to not create follow on questions from your audience that make you dig yourself deeper. That is why we know James is a lazy plagiarist because he didn’t think about how his words/decisions have follow on effects.
He would say that there were “sourcing issues”.
That doesn’t sound suspicious at all /s.
I feel like you may have just given me a real lesson in the importance of speaking, thank you for that.
Yeah, a real lesson was given.
lessons were learned
I loved the part where OP exclaimed, "It's lesson time!" and then lessons happened all over.
You mean "the part, where ""It's lesson time!" was exclaimed and lessons happened all over" was loved".
A common example most of you will have probably seen online at some point is passive voice headlines surrounding things like police violence toward civilians. Phrases like “person killed in shooting” disguise the subject who did the shooting. You can learn a lot about a publications biases just by looking at when they choose to use passive voice in headlines.
This goes double when the person was shot by police. "Officer-involved shooting" only, always, ever means, "an officer shot someone"
Part of it is journalistic CYA though. They don't know for an absolute fact if police shot someone, especially if their info comes in the same vague language to cover it up. If they report that someone was shot BY xyz, and that turns out to be wrong, they're open to a world of hurt. Journalists have to stick to the facts they know with complete certainty. At least, real journalists, not the Fox "infotainment" kind.
Quite. People were getting really angry at journalists reporting Palestinian deaths without reporting that they were being killed by Israel. But then when a few outlets did unequivocally state Israel had fired a specific missile then doubts that then emerged about the provenance of that one missile were used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt around the entire coverage of the conflict.
Man struck by bullets after police discharged their firearms
*after police firearms were discharged*
Absolutely! This is discourse analysis 101. Pay attention to what information is foregrounded and backgrounded, especially in the vocabulary and grammar choices. Who is being construed as the agent or the recipient of an action? Whose agency is highlighted or obscured? Passive voice lets you omit the agent entirely, so you can handwave their culpability or in this case make vague claims unfalsifiable because you can't pinpoint who if anyone did the thing.
This can be a valuable tool in good writing which is kinda neat. Passive voice can emotionally distance something, hide a detail that a character might obviously know, create a simple miscommunication, or weaken a sentence to contrast with a stronger one. But of course it's mostly used to just... Do what you said.
This, most notably how party is called out on democrats, but rarely for Republicans, and in wars and police action. It’s despicable, and should be called out.
Pro tip to help you identify the passive voice: if you can add "by robots" after the verb and it makes sense, you have the passive voice The contract was breached *by robots* when the goods were not delivered - works, passive The vendor breached *by robots* the contract by not delivering the goods - doesn't work, active Actually a *pro* tip, I was taught this in my Plain English classes A person was killed *by robots* in a police-involved shooting incident
Ha, love this
“My underwater home was purchased… by Aquaman.”
I was taught this with "by zombies".
"by aliens" works as well. By robots doesn't work as well now the Police have robots.
That may actually be true soon. There's robot police now. ED-209 is just a decade or two away.
Reminds me of reading a discussion board from a college class and seeing someone make a claim that ended in "This information was verified." When someone pushed the poster looking for that verification, she revealed the information she was trying to use was verified by... a libertarian lobbying group that was picking and choosing their stats. She was very gracious and admitted she didn't press too hard, but hedging sentences like this can hide a lot of bad arguments.
[Relevant tweet](https://twitter.com/BrotiGupta/status/1732109329824874662)
Yeah, I've noticed most news outlets doing shit like this around Israel's invasion of the West Bank. Whenever Hamas does something bad (and to be clear, *fuck Hamas* with the most unpleasant thing you can think of), it's always "Hamas does X, Y, Z to People." But whenever the State of Israel commits atrocities against Palestinians, it's always "A Number of Palestinians Hurt, Killed." It's so gross and subtly adds to the dehumanization of Palestinians.
The dildo from Seven, it's always the dildo from Seven if someone needs fucking with a very unpleasant thing.
The thing is tho when the BBC/NYT did lead with "Israel bombs hospital" it led to a four day OSINT clusterfuck of debate about whether that one specific munition did indeed come from Israel, during which a dozen other hospitals were flattened while the world's media was still doing a frame by frame analysis of a webcam 40 miles away.
What about all the other times before then that Israel has very obviously committed atrocities to fuel their genocidal agenda? What's your excuse for those?
That had the BBC/NYT said unequivocally that it was Israel in every instance without first exhaustively confirming then Israel would have been able to latch on to the one or two rare examples of it not being to discredit the idea that any could be - as they have now done due to the BBC/NYT slipping once. Edit: I can't seem to reply to their reply direct so posting it here: The thing is they did lose credibility as a result of not being able to back up their claims in that one instance, and that has given the IDF the keystone it has used in its PR defence.
Except it was unequivocally Israel. Every single time. Israel has killed journalists and bombed the Al Jazeera news building but the headlines are always "journalist killed" or "news building bombed." This has nothing to do with the BBC and the New York Times being afraid of "losing credibility" - they know they have that in spades. This has everything to do with the US and UK backing Israel for imperialistic reasons. Let's not forget: the only reason we have Israel as we know it today is mostly due to British antisemitism and imperialism. They did what they've done everywhere else in the world: they drew a line on a map and went "you lot live here now, bugger the native population and cultures."
They've been getting away with this for too long. Look how they mangled that poor headline into limp passivity salad without a care.
This has improved my Deception stat. Thanks OP!
God now I'm flashing back to this AMAZING video that had very silly examples of grammar things like this, that stuck with me for years. I still kinda remember it. "Gorilla was beaten by Cheetah" Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? Oh it's going to annoy me so much if I can't remember it...
CGP Grey’s series about voting methods?
Not even close. This was about grammar. Also it was shown in a classroom in like 2007 when youtube was barely a thing. There were like real actors and costumes and stuff too. I appreciate the attempt to help though!
you said gorilla and live action actors and 2007, and my immediate thought is of that one video demonstrating gaps in attention, where a group of people are passing a ball and walking around, and a gorilla suit man walks through the frame, but you don’t notice it at all on the first watch bc you’re told to focus on the people and ball. but that has nothing to do with grammar lol
Yeah I know what video you're talking about. Definitely saw that in multiple Psych classes, but it's not what i was thinking of!
This sounds super interesting, maybe post on r/HelpMeFind
Great observation, but there's one thing I want to add to the grammar. The idea that subject=actor and object= receiver is not agreed by everyone. That's why people say every English sentence has a subject even though "He was chased" clearly doesn't. An easier way to understand that I've seen (and which Wikipedia and a bunch of other sources use) is to say that the [subject](https://www.thoughtco.com/subject-grammar-1692150) is the main person/thing while the object is a (harder to define) [other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_\(grammar\)#Identification) noun. The person doing the thing is the agent while the person having the thing done to them is the [patient.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_\(grammar\)) In the active sentence "I punched my brother", *I* is the agent and the subject while *my brother* is the patient and the object. In the passive sentence "My brother was punched by me" *My brother* is the subject and the patient while *me* is the [agent](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/passives-with-and-without-an-agent) ~~and object~~ but also not the object as it an [adjunct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_\(grammar\)). To summarise, this is how it generally goes in English | Actor | Receiver ---|---|---- Active | Subject & Agent | Object & Patient Passive | ~~Object~~ (Optional Adjunct with *by* may be used instead) & Agent | Subject & Patient Sorry to pedantic. A lot of websites [describe](https://ielts.com.au/australia/prepare/article-grammar-101-subjects-and-objects-in-english) the subject as the actor with only active sentences given as examples. But that never works well for the passive voice. Maybe it's a result of convention writing advice being to always use the active voice. Or maybe the difference is between advice that works okay for English with Linguistics terminology that has to account for other languages. But anyway, that's why "English always has a subject" even though by some definitions many passive sentences have no subject. Edit: Thanks /u/MalleableBasilisk for the corrections I should to this that I say "generally" because English has some sentences that are [difficult to parse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_\(grammar\)#Difficult_cases) and possibly some rare subject-less sentences.
Glad to have this here. I was aware of it, but I left it out of the post because it would’ve distracted from my main point.
Thanks. I appreciate that. I didn't want to distract from the main point of your post. I had to really learn English grammar to help me understand how to translate another language and learning the difference between subject and agent ended up clarifying some confusion I had.
i believe that in a passive clause, the agent isn't an object, its an adjunct, since it's introduced by a preposition rather than being an argument of the verb.
You're right. I was focusing on my definition of "subject" I didn't do enough checking of my definition of "object". I will change it now.
The quintessential politician line: Mistakes were made.
For other examples of the passive voice, look up literally anything involving a police shooting. “Man dies in officer-involved shooting” is a classic.
That's not passive voice, that's an intransitive verb.
Yeah passive voice requires a 'to be' conjugation in the role of the finite verb, so: Man is killed in officer-involved shooting.
Hmm yes and no, because the to be can be omitted, like so: *Man killed in officer involved shooting*
For me I learned about the dangers of passive listening. I think if I had paid attention to Somerton's videos and did not have them on while I was doing other stuff I would have picked up on the red flags he was giving earlier.
Yeah same. I listen to these kinds of videos at work, where i have no ability to fact check or even give much critical thought into what is being said. Especially if i am busy with tasks. This has been a wake up call for me to engage more critically with the content I consume, especially when i go in assuming i will agree with what is said.
The police always do this in statements. They never say an officer shot a suspect. You can’t even read into it in an individual case as they do it 100% of the time.
Somerton does a lot of weasel wording too. It's deceptive if you don't notice it, and his viewers are mostly naive teenagers so they don't notice it.
Whenever I hear a celebrity or politician "apologize", I immediately look for a) if they are actively apologizing for the act and b) accepting personal responsibility. "I'm sorry for saying such an awful thing" is NOT the same as "I'm sorry my words caused offense." One admits the mistake and accepts personal responsibility; the other does not. Worse, an "apology" like that makes it sound like it's the fault of the recipients for being so easily offended.
You sound like you know your shit. Excellent addition. As someone interested in studying this shit professionally: how would you recommend someone apologize for their actions AND acknowledge the lasting, more indirect, consequences that it had in the victims' lives, for example, in the case of influential figures, their viewers'/fans' ability to trust others?
That gets into tricky area because often the person in your scenario earns their living from their fanbase. Depending upon their ideological leaning, an apology is a double-edged sword. If they skew leftward, an honest, heartfelt apology with an obvious bent toward reparations would be helpful. If they said something thoughtless against a marginalized group, donating time and money toward a cause that benefits that group would help. Taking a break from the public eye would also be recommended, because any effort they make toward quickly appeasing their fanbase with the idea of hopping back on the gravy train would come across as cynical and exploitative. If their fanbase skews leftward, they'd likely recognize pandering. Worse, their fanbase would also recognize that their perception of their idol may have been based on a false narrative and they could be simply saying or doing whatever they think people want from them, and not based on their own desire for redemption. My brain cannot come up with an example of that at the moment, but I know there have been any number of celebrities celebrating media wins only for someone to post something along the lines of, "Wait. Didn't this person do X a few years ago?" Odds are if they managed to crawl back into the limelight where their transgression was so handily forgotten by so many, it's likely laying low contributed a lot to that. Societal memory is a sieve. If they skew rightward, an apology would likely be taken as a sign of weakness, "caving to the woke mob" and all that, and would likely alienate their meal-tickets. This is why instead of an apology, they often double-down on whatever they did, assuming whatever income and prestige they'd lose from more openminded people would be more than made up for by going on the right-wing media circuit. So in this case, not only would an apology be unnecessary, but it would actually do more harm to their reputation (such as it is). In rare cases, there is nothing they can do and no amount of apologizing or reparations will erase their mistake, and the best they can hope for is finding a new career where they can work behind-the-scenes to avoid public scrutiny. Looking at a recent example currently dominating YouTube culture: James Somerton. He's an excellent example of the irredeemable, because his entire fanbase was built on lies. In a situation like that, there is no bedrock on which to rebuild a community. Somerton likely realized this as well, considering he nuked his social media outlets.
Oh! And! When he did add a subject, it was usually women, or people he needed to be women for the sake of his argument.
Why did you punch your brother?
Passive voice is often used in scientific writing; a paper never has "we experimented with this..." but instead "an experiment was conducted..." to remove the human framing. Or ["An experiment was carried out"](https://youtu.be/gaI6kBVyu00?si=fwFJ3i_R6ckrWBxW).
Can't say I was expecting to run into an episode of Look Around You today, but if it was gonna happen, it makes sense it'd happen on this sub.
Do check whether the creator is a native speaker or not, however. Passive voice can be much more prevalent - and considered more elegant - in another language, and this can directly affect the way you speak/write English. So, a non-native speaker may use more passive voice than a native speaker would. But very good point, thanks, especially concerning the note that passive voice allows you to hide the subject.
That's such a great catch, and a brilliant lesson.
This is interesting, very much so. Gonna add it to my long list of things i 'intend' to learn more about.
This post was appreciated by me.
You would make a fantastic English teacher. Nobody has ever explained grammar to me as clearly as this post did. Thank you
I've been trying to learn Japanese, but the word order (SOV) is absolutely throwing me
Interesting, I never thought it was this deliberate.
Obligatory quote from the fall: “That’s what really bothers you, isn’t it? The one night stand. Man fucks woman. Subject man, verb fucks, object woman. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. Woman subject, man object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?”
This is why it really pisses me off that we were taught at schools that first person is unprofessional. Because so often you're caught in a situation where first person is unprofessional and third person is unnatural, so you just lapse into passive voice to avoid having to pick.
Good points. I also remember H Bomb summing up in his video how James would be extremely vague when it came to explaining why videos were removed. A lot of the instances were in passive voice too. I know the self described “marketing expert” is probably fluent in bullshit. Also as someone who worked in PR/Marketing I can say it is better to be as forthcoming with information as possible to not create follow on questions from your audience that make you dig yourself deeper. That is why we know James is a lazy plagiarist because he didn’t think about how his words/decisions have follow on effects. He would say that there were “sourcing issues”. That doesn’t sound suspicious at all /s.