Passive voice can be eliminated just about every time.

From JB Dryden's company ("A blog about the daily rigors of a freelance fiction editor (and writer) with a passion for beating terrible grammar into submission"):

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Being that I haven’t been inspired as of late, I decided to visit a few of my regular blog reads. I came across this from a couple of weeks ago. Grammar Girl spoke about passive versus active voice. Her thoughts were well spoken, but there was something in it that I wanted to elaborate on:

Another important point is that passive sentences aren't incorrect; it’s just that they often aren't the best way to phrase your thoughts. Sometimes passive voice is awkward and other times it’s vague.

More as an editor than as a grammarian (and I am both), I find passive voice distracting. Over the past decade, the vastly-expanding Post-Modern movement has been sweeping over the literary world. There is a wealth of books in the market, which are laced with Post-Modern style. In my opinion, passive voice is the weapon of choice in most of those styles. In the way that those stories are told – the slice-of-life, lack of emphasis on anything in particular happening – passive voice seems not only natural but in an over-abundance.

I don’t like it. I never have. I want a story that tells me something, in which characters do something, and in the end there’s a resolution. Passive voice and passive writing doesn’t accomplish anything – nor does it seek or have the goal of accomplishing anything. As Grammar Girl pointed out, it can be eliminated just about every time. It is best to write actively, for your characters to drive the action, and for your plot to be the focus not the backdrop.

The worst place to find passive voice, though, is in business writing, and over the past few months I’ve become increasingly aware of it. With more and more people in businesses opting for emails as their preferred method of communication, there is a sincere lack of attention paid to how things get written when something more formal is required. And without anyone in the office with an eye keen enough to point out the flaws in such writing, businesses seems unschooled when it comes to their writing samples. What’s worse is that when I am asked to write something for someone in my office, it gets rewritten with passive voice because it sounds more PC or less “offensive” as one manager told me.

Example:

I wrote: I need these forms to be signed by the end of the week, or Mr. X will not be able to get you your money.

Manager rewrote: These forms will need your signature sometime this week, so that your money may be sent out in a timely fashion.

We got our signed papers three days late. It's not straight-forward, and there's no sense of urgency.

It just doesn’t make sense to beat around the bush in a business because nothing is going to get done. Just as in your stories your characters perform actions, your writing in any setting needs to show someone doing something. Otherwise, the piece of paper is just being written upon by you.

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By my count, this denunciation of passive verbs contains six of the little varmints -- seven if you count the final sentence, which I'm willing to assume was intended to be ironic. With the others, though, I see nothing to suggest that the preacher realized he was slipping into sin.

There is much else to remark on here, and not just the many instances of the Law of Prescriptive Retaliation at work. (Passive verbs are the weapons of postmodernism! These forms will need your signature is a passive construction! Dogs flew spaceships!) But it's late, and I've almost used up my allotment of snarkiness for the week.