Blogs buzzed this week with a headline that sent high school English teachers everywhere running in horror: Passive Voice is Redeemed for Web Headings.

Usability super-guru Jakob Nielsen's claim isn't actually quite as incendiary as you might think: He just backs up a somewhat accepted sentiment that passive voice is ok when it's necessary to bring keywords to the front of a headline with sexy eyetracking research showing that web readers, fanatically scanning the thousands of unread items in their RSS readers or whatnot, often read only the first two words of a paragraph.

Active voice automaton I may be, but even I can get behind the occasional passive construction of absolutely necessary for grabbing readers' attention. Unfortunately, though, I'm not convinced by either of Jakob's primary examples.

First off, the in-text example:

13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

According to Jakob, the words "design guidelines" carry the most weight in this sentence, and "13″ is short enough to not count in the "first two" rule of thumb.

So why not make 13 design guidelines the subject rather than the object?

13 design guidelines for tab controls make Yahoo Finance easy to navigate, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

And activating the construction of that the-medium-is-the-message headline of Jakob's piece is even easier:

Passive Voice Works Best for Web Headings

…or does it?