Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Linux contributors told to sort out their grammar lest they be actively corrected

Linux chieftain Linus Torvalds was spotted getting a bit worked up over grammar on Sunday night on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

While Torvalds is known for getting ticked off about coding, this time he was lambasting the grammatical rather than the coding syntax of contributors. The problem? Devs' use of the passive voice.

Would that he had established a style guide prior to this process, we immediately thought, slipping into the pluperfect subjunctive mood, a place of regrets where few happy things dwell.

Not unfairly, Torvalds noted on the message board that he tries to make his merge commit messages "cohesive" by editing the pull request language to "match a more standard layout and language." He added: "It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have 15 different indentation models and bullet syntaxes." (It would seem Torvalds is on the uniformity team of the tabs vs spaces debate.)

The Linux kernel creator then revealed his current bugbear, which, we might add, is the very same problem tech and science editors run into every day – the remorseless, unnecessary use of the passive voice.

Grammatical errors in the post itself notwithstanding (Muphry's law is axiomatic in this type of post, and likely also in this article describing it), The Reg thinks Torvalds is correct. The passive construction, which may be found in scientific papers and technical writing, can be confusing and annoying. It creates a lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency, but often hides important information about who should be doing what and when. For example: "Mistakes were made" and certain things just magically "happened" to the hardware. Ideal for certain vendor manuals, then.

The Linux supremo declared:

But what *does* make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative.

Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd "love it" (yep, he's a new man) if people would avoid writing their "descriptions as 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.' Instead, write it as 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..'"

The directive comes years after the last time matters beyond the code came to the fore with the great punctuation rant of 2016, where Torvalds pressed "brain-damaged shit-for-brains devs" to drop the "disgusting drug-induced crap" and use asterisks properly. He's toned it down several notches, basically.

So there you have it, folks. Simple ambiguity-killing declarative sentences or imperative phrases – you can't beat 'em. ®

PS: In case you missed it, Torvalds over the weekend vented his frustration once again with the development of the experimental Bcachefs file-system in the Linux kernel. "I'm contemplating just removing bcachefs entirely from the mainline tree," Linus sighed in response to the latest set of fixes.