One of the things that irritates me most about the English language is the fact that the imperfect tense is nearly identical to the passive voice.

As I first learned in my French classes, there are two main forms of the immediate past tense: the complete past and the continuous past. In French, those are the imparfait, the continuous or ongoing past (je travaillais quand il m’interrompt), and the passé composé, the repetitive or complete past (j’ai travaillé). In English, the imparfait is the imperfect (I was working when he interrupted me) and the passé composé is the simple past (I worked). In French, the two tenses are equally valid; you use whichever applies to the action. In fact, it’s grammatically incorrect to use the passé composé for an ongoing action.

In English, however, the imperfect tense has been relegated to the bin of "bad writing" because of its similarity to the passive voice. If you write, "He was hammering nails into the baseboard, and she was reading a book," someone will probably correct the sentence to read, "He hammered nails into the baseboard, and she read a book." That’s not actually grammatically correct, especially in the form of a narrative. It’s a continuous action; the imperfect tense correctly depicts the action as something that has happened before the arrival of the narrator and is still going on. But to make the sentence look "active", the simple past tense gets wedged in where it doesn’t belong.

Passive voice, on the other hand, is distinctive–it’s just placing the subject of a verb in the object position. "He was hit by a ball," instead of "The ball hit him." Simple. But just because of the "was" in both forms, passive voice and imperfect tense get boxed into the same category of Things To Avoid. Imperfect, indeed. It just drives me crazy.