[ellius]

You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.

[thaumasiotes]

By the way, while the "punch" of a sentence is often placed either first or last for stylistic reasons, and both are fine, there is another kind of phrase for which final position is strongly preferred.

I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.

I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.

[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."