P. V. or not P. V.:

What’s the Problem with Passive Voice?

 

As violations of prose decorum go, passive voice is definitely a misdemeanor, not a major offense. So why do English teachers spend so much time trying to get their students to eliminate it from their writing? Because a paper that indulges itself in needless passive voice is likely to indulge itself in quite a lot of it – with consequent costs to the paper’s clarity, conciseness, and general stylistic vigor. If you are writing a piece of fiction, such qualities may not be all that important to your prose, but in a piece of expository analysis, the keenness of the writing will almost always play an important part in persuading (or alienating) the reader.

 

What is “Passive Voice”? “Passive voice” is a syntactical construction which reverses the logic of standard English grammar. A standard “active” sentence will always contain a subject, a verb, and (if the verb is transitive) a direct object (the item that receives the action of the verb), and in that precise order. In contrast, the subject of a passive voice sentence does not perform the action, but actually has the action performed upon it by an indirect object that the sentence often does not identify.

 

	Subject	Verb	Direct Object	[Indirect Object]
Active Voice	I	bought	the book.
Passive Voice	The book	was bought		[by me].

In this simple example, the passive version requires two extra words to convey the same information that the active sentence does. So active voice is always going to be more concise, a quality which will almost always aid the expository writer’s cause. As its name suggests, active voice also tends to make a sentence feel more vigorous, even more robust, than its passive counterpart, an impression that will also in general aid the writer trying to persuade his reader of a particular point.

 

But more important than the loss of conciseness or vigor is the loss of clarity and specificity that often results from passive voice. Passive voice allows – in fact encourages – writers to omit the agent of action and thereby avoid an assignment of responsibility. This aspect of passive voice is precisely what makes it such a handy tool for political spokespersons whose job is to make the horrible, the atrocious, and the generally unspeakable somehow presentable. For example, the general at the Desert Storm news conference acknowledged that “Ordnances were delivered against their targets” because someone might actually have protested if he’d used plainer language: “We bombed the hell out of them.” Similarly, the attorney general in discussing the decision to storm the Waco compound might admit that “Mistakes were made,” but she’s certainly not going to come right out and say that “We blew it, and killed a lot of people in the process.” Passive voice serves as a convenient cloak for those who want to hide the true form of what they are describing. The honest writer will, therefore, prefer to shun it, a form of obfuscation unworthy of a strong argument.

 

How do I fix passive voice? To activate passive voice sentences, you first have to identify them. To spot them, look for the tell-tale verb form; all passive voice sentences use a compound verb consisting of some form of the verb to be followed by a past participle (usually the “-ed” form of a verb).

 

 

Remember that any form of the verb to be (am, are, is, was, were, been, being) will work for passive voice, and it often does not appear right next to the past participle that completes the passive voice verb. For example, “They were not really thrown into the abyss” is a passive voice sentence even though the words “not really” intervene between the to be verb (“were”) and the past participle (“thrown”).

 

Once you have identified a passive voice sentence, activate it by following these three steps:

 

(1)  Identify the agent of the action and place that agent in the subject position at the beginning of the sentence.

(2)  Remove the to be verb and re-conjugate the past participle to agree with the new subject.

(3)  Take the old subject of the passive sentence and place it in the direct object position right after the newly conjugated verb.

 

Here are two examples drawn from an actual student paper; the passive verbs appear in bold italics for easy identification. Please note with the second one in particular that activating a sentence often requires (or at least encourages) the re-arrangement of many of its elements:

 

(1)  Passive: In Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death," Death is personified as an amiable gentleman-caller, thus enabling the reader to see death in a positive light.

 

Active: In “Because I could not Stop for Death,” Dickinson personifies Death as an amiable and even attractive gentleman-caller.

 

               

(2)  Passive: Yet, for the first stanza, immortality's presence, openly hinting at the soul's departure from the body and the longer pilgrimage into eternity, is barely acknowledged and quickly forgotten.

 

Active: Immortality’s presence openly hints at the soul’s departure from the body and the longer pilgrimage into eternity, yet the first stanza barely acknowledges it, allowing the reader quickly to forget it.

 

Do I have to activate all passive voice sentences? Of course not. Some sentences really do sound better in passive than in active form, and sometimes, you cannot actually identify the agent of the action, or at least not without creating unnecessary or debilitating awkwardness. “It is finished,” said Jesus at the climactic moment on the cross; no one would encourage him to say instead, “Those centurions have finished it” (or something like that).

 

But such instances are the exception, not the norm. In more than fifteen years of marking student papers, I would estimate that 80% of the passive voice sentences I’ve encountered were needless, and would have worked better if their authors had activated them. So if you needn’t knock yourself dead activating every passive sentence, you should discipline yourself to activate the great majority of them. In the long run, you’ll find that the greater emphasis on active verbs will enliven your expository writing and enhance its intended effects.