These lists get passed around; while some of the suggestions are things an aspiring writer can benefit from immediately, most of them are either things the novice can't interpret properly (what does E. B. White's dictum "remove unnecessary words" mean? What's an unnecessary word? How do you know?) or are flat out wrong. Let's take a look at a couple of them.

"Rule" 2: don't use passive voice is simply bullshit. All it demonstrates is that Mr. King doesn't know formal English grammar, since he uses a technical term from formal grammar without knowing what it actually means. In this, he's got a massive amount of company: almost all writers who advise against using the passive voice demonstrate in their writing that they don't have a clue. They use the passive at the same rate as everyone else, which is usually somewhere north of 20%.

So let's get a clue. There is one absolutely sure-fire way to identify a verb that's in the passive voice: that particular sense of the verb is transitive, meaning that it has a required direct, indirect or oblique object. In the passive voice, that object has gone missing. It might have migrated to the subject, but if you're dealing with a subordinate clause, there might not be a subject, so you can't depend on the subject's semantic role (actor, agent, natural cause, experiencer, etc.) as a clue.

All the other ways of identifying a passive construction have holes you could drive an armored convoy through.

The truth is, though, that many novice writers do use the passive where the active voice would do as well or better. So what's a piece of advice that a novice writer could actually use to replace this bogus rule with?

The root problem is actually simple: the writer doesn't know what she wants to say. Most of the time, identifying the real topic of the sentence (not the same thing as the subject) will automatically eliminate not only the passive voice, but a number of other ills as well.

Consider the following sentence fragment:

1. The drop in morale was caused by the committee's report on appropriate attire for junior female employees.

This is in the passive voice: cause requires a direct object, and that object has migrated to the subject.

What's the topic? Is it the drop in morale, is it the policy or is it the report (maybe it was printed upside down?)

If morale is the topic, possibly:

2. The drop in morale results from the new policy on appropriate attire for junior female employees.

If it's the policy, then:

3. The new rules about appropriate attire for junior female employees has created a morale problem.

See? It's like magic. An inappropriate use of the passive voice has just vanished, poof!, without having to pontificate about grammar or wimpy expression or anything else.

The real rule is:

Know what you want to say, and say it as directly and clearly as you can. If that requires the passive voice or a couple of adverbs, so be it.