Passive Voice and Punctuation.

One of the main things stressed in my high school writing courses was to avoid writing in the passive voice. The only reasoning that I was given for this was that writing in passive voice makes for a less engaging sentence. Since the subject content in the sentence is being acted upon instead of doing the action, the reader falls out of identity with the content. I have always disagreed with this mainly because I feel that the reader could be equally if not more engaged with the content in passive voice. One other rule that I feel can be broken effectively in non-formal writing is proper punctuation. The boom of text messaging and online chat have created a world of punctuation that shapes how modern typers express ideas. One venue in which this is done is emoticons. For example, if I wanted to express that I'm done with my post and satisfied with the ideas I've shared I might do this: :)