The wikipedia article about the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party at one point flagged the passive ‘could not be reconciled’ with ‘by whom’ in a sentence about the break-up of the party into two separate organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Socialist_Revolutionary_Party&oldid=992937410
Increasingly, a faction of SR members formed
rejecting the Provisional Government's authority
and began to operate within the soviets with the
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The divisions between
the SR factions supporting the Provisional
Government or the Petrograd Soviet could not be
reconciled [by whom?] and the party split over
the course of the summer of 1917 into the Right
and Left SRs.
<sarcasm>Inquiring minds want to know. Who could not reconcile the differences of the factions?</sarcasm>
Some (but not all) passives (and not this passive) benefit from specifying the agent of the action.
For example, it’s good to hear opinions, but when we hear one, it is also good to know whose opinion it is. So, ‘it is said/claimed that ..’ without a ‘who by’ is not good.
Like reconciliation, the same applies in other cases, where ‘it takes two to tango’.
Suppose two firms enter talks and after talks it ‘is decided’ that a joint venture ‘will be set up.’ It is senseless to ask who the joint venture will be set up by and silly to wonder who the decision was made by.
Of course, the process of setting up the joint venture could be interesting, and we may want to know who said what, but that’s not a job for a sentence with a verb in the passive.
The flagging of ‘could not be reconciled’ is probably the result of an automatic process crawling the wikipedia website, not any human prejudiced against the passive, but I just want to register my support for the passive.
Go, passive!
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