You should go, say, six months, in which you never use “suppose” in the passive voice. Whenever you feel the inclination to say “it is supposed...” or “you're supposed to...”, force yourself to rephrase your sentence in the active voice. This requires, of course, that you find a supposer, and name him. At that point you will discover what it is you're really trying to say.
Numeromancer suggested that you rewrite your sentence which uses "suppose" in passive voice, into active voice.
It is a school exercise at least in some European countries. It is a syntactic transformation of the sentence. Depending on the verb and other factors, the transformation preserves meaning, but sometimes it brings up a subject which was not clear in the original sentence in passive voice.
Thus, Numeromancer is suggesting a way for you to reflect on the scope of authority by using a syntactic transformation.
> Not enough people know this, but when you say "etc" out loud in reference to the directory, I suppose it should sound like "etsy".
The passive voice, combined with the opening phrase, gives the false appearance that the subject is the pronunciation of ‘/etc’, when the true subject is you. I put it the way I did because it is a good exercise and because I didn't want it to seem impetuous.
That changes the meaning quite a bit--in the original, the word "suppose" was used in the sense of an obligation; in the new sentence, the word "suppose" is used to mean "a guess".
If you're saying that I was being passive aggressive, that's my bad, because I was aiming for over-the-top bravado and didn't go big enough for it to be funny, I guess. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/
