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We have two tags for grammatical voice:

And we have exactly 18 questions tagged with the latter.

But every single active voice question also mentions the passive voice!

It doesn't really make sense to split these up. These questions are generally about the relationship between active and passive—the grammatical relationship, the semantic relationship, or both. And even if we have a couple questions that really are about the passive voice only, we don't need a separate tag for the active voice.

Theoretically, we might want a single tag called "voice", but that wouldn't be very helpful for our users; linguists might call this a system of voice, but I think most people will probably try typing in "passive" first and "active" second.

So let's merge them into a single tag called .

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  • I agree with the merge. I have just one comment, from a learner's point of view. I think perhaps it's more likely that a learner will expect the tag "passive-voice" rather than "passive-active" when they focus only on the passive voice in their example sentences. But we could help them by providing a good description for the tag, so they would understand the tag immediately once they typed passive and the tag popped up.
    – Damkerng T.
    May 24, 2015 at 0:54
  • @DamkerngT. What about passive-and-active? Would that be any better?
    – user230
    May 24, 2015 at 2:40
  • @snailboat +1 vote. Quite agree.
    – Araucaria - Not here any more.
    May 24, 2015 at 12:15
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    It makes sense to me to split them up. They represent two different constructions. Just because tags do not have many questions does not mean they are not meaningful. Plus, learners are probably much more used to seeing "passive voice" and may hesitate at "passive-active." Many learners may just tag it grammar and be done with it. But I think we should stick to the well-known terms.
    – user6951
    Jun 4, 2015 at 4:22

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Could we make them tag synonyms?

Part of the function of tagging is to give appropriate names to things. Tags teach the important terminology and concepts of the topic. People don't ordinarily say "passive-active". "Passive voice" and "active voice" are part of the common vocabulary for talking about English grammar.

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    I would advocate making voice (or, ick, grammatical-voice) the canonical tag and making active-voice and passive-voice synonyms of that.
    – choster
    May 25, 2015 at 5:51
  • @choster That sounds ideal to me (with voice rather than grammatical-voice).
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 30, 2015 at 4:55

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