Passive voice and jargon are teachable techniques for hiding agency

Evidence

Professor Gerald Grow (2012) has written brief guidelines called “How to Write ‘Official,’” which provides a set of rules on how to communicate opaque-ly and misinformatively. These rules, which specify the nine top features of good euphemistic writing, include: Put it in the passive voice and delete the agent of the actions; inflate with terminology that does not add meaning; build in noun strings; add a qualifier of uncertain relation to the original statement; add noun strings and terminology to the qualifier; separate related words; equivocate and obfuscate; cover your tracks and make yourself look good. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 373

Categorization

• SEED: Grow’s nine rules could anchor a practical piece: ‘deleting the agent’ via passive voice is the single grammatical move that strips moral responsibility from sentences.
• DEFINE: Crisply enumerates the formal linguistic maneuvers, topmost being passive voice that conceals who acts.
• XREF: Passive-voice agent deletion connects to Zamyatin’s We and bureaucratic registers that erase individual responsibility. — connects to: Deploying technical jargon in public meetings functions as a silencing tactic against residents; Technical jargon functions as a silencing weapon against unschooled residents — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 235; Institutional bureaucratic writing follows teachable rules for opacity and misinformation
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 373