Humans hardwired to use the passive voice

[Baron, Dennis E]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Humans hardwired to use the passive voice


The human brain is hardwired to prefer the passive voice. A definite predilection for passive constructions has been found by a team of neuroscientists led by Elaine Bao Weiss and W. Strang-Ng, postdoctoral researchers at Cornell University’s Neurosyntax Imaging Laboratory.

“This was totally unexpected,” Bao Weiss said of the findings. “Generations of writers have been advised to prefer the active to the passive, but that’s not how the brain works.”

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Read the full post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/1gJlLxA

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