syntax.passive-voice
What it flags
Passive-voice constructions. Passive hides the agent and lengthens the sentence without adding information. Legitimate exceptions exist (unknown agent, scientific style, intentional focus on the action) — the rule flags, the author decides.
References. US Plain Language; Strunk & White; FALC.
At a glance
| Category | syntax |
| Default severity | warning |
| Default weight | 2 |
| Languages | EN · FR (separate heuristics) |
| Source | src/rules/passive_voice.rs |
Detection (v0.1 heuristic)
- 🇬🇧
be(conjugated) + past participle[+ by …]. Handles regular-edand the irregular-participle table. - 🇫🇷
être(conjugated) + past participle[+ par …], plusse faire + infinitif. Harder than EN because of participle agreement (gender/number) and confusion with (a) subject attribute (il est contentvsil est vu) and (b) compound-tenseêtreauxiliary (elle est partie—passé composé, active).
Expect ~70–80% precision. A POS-parser-based replacement is planned for a future lucid-lint-nlp plugin.
Parameters
| Key | Type | dev-doc | public | falc |
|---|---|---|---|---|
max_per_paragraph | int | 3 | 1 | 0 |
ignore_scientific_style | bool | false | false | false |
Suppression
Use inline disables on intentional passives. See Suppressing diagnostics.
References
See References for the full bibliography.