No, the anti-passive voice thing isn't solely American. I'm English and I've certainly encountered it. Mind you, I've just had a look in two grammar books that I happen to have; only one has anything negative to say about the passive. Even there, the anti-comments are pretty guarded. Basically, the book's authors suggest that, while active voice might be more effective than the passive, this does not apply in all cases. Nor is it appropriate to always use the active voice in preference to the passive.
Like Yvonne and LabRat, though, I don't think I learned anything about writing voices at school. I think all my Englishe teachers cared about was making sure that our sentences always contained a finite verb and didn't start with conjunctions. (They were really big on punctuation, too.)
I certainly remember one classmate being told off for using short, snappy sentence fragments in a story she'd written on the basis that they weren't good English. When she protested that the books she was reading used similar constructions, our teacher said that when we were published authors with a wealth of experience behind us, we could do what we liked. In the meantime, our English had to obey the rules she was teaching us.
So, yes, I've come across the anti-passive argument, but not, as far as I can remember, in school.
Wendy has more or less beaten me to what I wanted to say about academic writing. Like her, I spent years in academia. There, I learned pretty quickly that everything should be written in third person passive voice. In other words, instead of saying: "I distributed a questionnaire..." I would have to write "The questionnaire was distributed..."
Nonetheless, I definitely picked up that passive voice was frowned upon in fiction. I'm not sure whether I learned that up from grammar checkers or from somewhere else, though.
In my current job, which is blessedly far removed from academia, I have a boss who is very into Plain English. He returned the first couple of reports I wrote for him with a number of suggestions for toning down the academic tenor of my language. (I thought I had, but clearly I hadn't gone far enough...) Certainly, since then, I've learned to restrict my use the passive.
Actually, I think I've learned a lot about writing since I started my current job. I now make a conscious effort to use shorter sentences and to avoid starting sentences with 'it'.
Short answer... Passive voice is okay in certain contexts and, more generally, in moderation. However, when you want fast paced action, the active voice seems to work much more effectively.
Chris (who just rewrote that last sentence to avoid... the passive voice.)
