Tony hunted down the last recalcitrant letter on his keyboard. That was it; finally his report was finished. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction only to find McGee peering intently over his shoulder.

"You might want to rephrase that bit there," his finger hovered over the text on the screen.

"Why?"

"You've used passive voice," said McGee simply.

Tony raised an eyebrow but McGee was staring at him expectantly as though he had just answered the question. He turned to appeal to Gibbs but found him smirking at his desk. Ziva, looking inordinately interested in proceedings, offered him no solace either.

"The problem with passive voice," McGee explained as though talking to someone actually interested in what he was saying, "is that it both weakens the force of the sentence and transfers the subject of the sentence to whatever the verb is acting on. So where you've said 'The bullet was lodged in the heart of the victim' you've made the bullet the subject and it's being acted on by 'lodged'."

Tony could not have looked more stunned if McGee had ripped off his own leg and eaten it in front of him. At least he knew who would fill the void when Ducky finally left.

"So," continued McGee unperturbed, leaning past Tony and typing authoritatively, "if we make this: 'The bullet lodged in the victim's heart', then the bullet is actually doing the acting."

He stood back and admired his work. "See how much better that flows?"

The look on Tony's face told him that he didn't.

"Look," McGee tried again, "There's a little mnemonic," he paused, "a little memory prompt", he re-phrased, "about passive voice called the 'Passive Voice Carol'. It's sung to the tune of 'Oh Christmas Tree':

Oh passive voice, oh passive voice,

The verb's object's the subject.

Avoid all 'seems', likewise 'of the',

Don't use 'as though' or 'found to be',

And 'that' and 'was' are bad because,

They'll lead you into trouble.

See, you've used 'of the'."

Tony wondered lightly if McGee could feel the ice thinning beneath him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gibbs smothering a laugh. Directly in front of him, Ziva threw her head down and pretended to be intensely interested in something on her desk.

"Oh," McGee continued helpfully, scanning over the document, "and there's an apostrophe between the 'there' and the's'; 'there's' is a contraction of 'there' and 'is'."

"My words are having contractions now? What, I inserted a pregnant pause 9 months ago? What exactly is the gestation period of a word, McGeek?"

"No, no, a contraction of the words like a concatenation of 'there' and 'is'," McGee clarified cheerfully.

Across the room, Gibbs and Ziva heard the last straw gently touch down atop the camel's load.

Tony inflated from his seat, the volume of his voice directly proportional to his height above the chair. "Well how's this for not using passive voice. I'm sure swashbuckling, socially repugnant Special Agent Tommy and Lisa, the sultry and emotionally distant Mossad officer write grammatically perfect reports but here in the real world we just write the facts. You are starting to really get on my nerves, McGeek."

"And you," said McGee smugly, "have just spilt an infinitive."