You want to sound like a bureaucrat or a cheat? Go ahead and write in the passive voice.
Everybody who writes books like this one always tells you: favour the active voice. We have our reasons. The vitality is sucked out of prose, if I may say so in the passive voice, by the passive voice—if it’s overdone. But the passive voice has its uses, as the best style gurus have always conceded.
Most of us write in Word these days and are subject to its grammar checker, which is implacable in its enmity to the passive voice, and dependable in finding it. As a result, people have come to imagine that to write in the passive voice is to commit a mortal grammatical sin. Not so. What we’re talking about here is a rule of
style—of courtesy and economy and grace. Make the active voice your default function. Keep the passive voice for the purposes it serves—and we’ll get to those.
What is the passive voice?
Verbs have two voices—active and passive.When the verb is active, the subject acts. When the voice is passive, the subject is acted upon. In the active voice, the subject is also the actor (the agent of the action). What it performs is the verb. In passive-voiced sentences, the subject is not the actor. It is the recipient of the action—a kind of object, if you like. And the actor may not even be named.
Here’s the difference—active voice first. I wrote this sentence in
the active voice.This sentence was written in the passive voice.
So, in this sentence—‘In this document, we propose changes to the law on gambling’—the subject (we) acts (propose) upon the object (changes).
In this sentence, by contrast—‘In this document, a number of changes to the law of gambling are proposed’—the subject (a number of changes to the law of gambling) is acted upon (are proposed) by an unnamed but implied agent (by us).
Some examples of passive-voiced sentences
• The proposed policy was discussed and issues arising from it were
debated.
• A meeting of the PTA will be held on Tuesday night at 8. • The measures were approved by the board.
• The ball is passed to Cooper. • The trees were planted in 1934.
• Your application has been turned down.
• Pursuant to the recommendations of our consultants, a number of changes are to be instigated at ANX.
What does the passive look like?
In the passive voice the verb takes a specific form: a combination of the verb to be in one of its tenses and the past participle of the verb. It is from the tense of the verb to be that the form takes its tense. Verbs can be passive in every tense under the sun. It’s from the construction that the verb takes its voice.
So: have been achieved, is achieved, will be achieved, are given, were given, am overwhelmed, will be overwhelmed, was overwhelmed, were being overwhelmed, will be performed, will be controlled.
The (im)personality of the passive voice
A sentence in the passive voice downplays agency; it subdues the subject, rendering her inactive; it leaves out the actors or delays their appearance; it speaks like an official affecting disinterest; at best it sounds calm and objective, at worst, officious. It’s what it sounds like that’s the biggest problem. It’s a voice that implies that things have occurred by force of preordained necessity, at the hand of some god. It suggests the speaker takes no responsibility and couldn’t care less.
Objectivity is what too many writers have been trying for too long to affect by writing in the passive voice. Objectivity is good as far as it goes; and the passive voice is one way to do it. By leaving oneself or any agent out, you make your sentences sound less personal and more detached. But the passive voice, particularly when it becomes a habit, strips sentences of humanity, personality and life.
So what’s wrong with writing passively?
1 It’s sneaky. Well, it can be. The closest Richard Nixon got to taking responsibility for Watergate was to say ‘Mistakes have been made’. If dodging the blame is your game, don’t use it— the game is up.
Even if you’re not trying to be shifty, you run the risk of sounding like all those people who are.
2 It’s stiff. Except in skilful hands, passive sentences, and especially passive paragraphs, sound pompous, lofty and stiff. Passive-aggressive, even, or defensive, because the writer is withholding the whole truth—who’s taking responsibility. Passive sentences make readers nervous, uncomfortable and suspicious. Here’s an example of unnecessary and all too commonplace stuffiness:
A licence will be issued upon receipt of a correctly completed application form.
3 It’s dull. It bores us. How can it fail to, if it’s sustained? Where are the people doing things? Where is the action? Nothing’s doing in the passive voice.
4 It’s vague. Where it leaves out the actor, the passive-voiced sentence withholds information the reader needs. It’s not that we care exactly who the agent is. It’s just that if you don’t put someone in that role, we’ll have to guess. And guessing gets dull pretty fast. Being left in the dark (which is sometimes the point) gets aggravating, too.
5 It’s inefficient. If you write in the passive you leave something out (the agent of the action), upon which comprehension depends. So your sentence won’t ever work for your reader quite as well that way. Even if you put that piece in the sentence at the end, following ‘by’, you’ll be using more words to tell the same story than you would in the active voice. It may not seem much, but it adds up:
The following are key components that were noted during our investigation.
Why not,‘We noted the following factors’ or ‘Our study uncov- ered the following points’?
And what’s right about it?
Turns out the language did have some uses in mind when it threw up the passive voice.
1 Coherence. The passive voice comes in handy when knitting sentences, or phrases in a sentence, together, trying to make them flow and cohere. Here’s an example:
In Oregon, there is a group of friends who call themselves ‘The Homeless Waifs Holiday Club’. The group was formed in the 1970s when a generation of college students realized they weren’t going home for Thanksgiving ...
—Kim Stafford, The Muses Among Us
Starting the second sentence with ‘the group’ keeps our atten- tion on it, and opens out into some more information about that topic.This is gracious composition.We hardly notice it’s passive at all.
2 Emphasis. I may want to emphasise the person acted upon and not the actor. Like this: ‘The pilot was found in the crashed plane. He was taken from the wreckage by Bedouins.’ Or like this: ‘Charles Wright was born in 1935’. It just wouldn’t make much sense to say write that particular sentence with Charles Wright’s mother. This suggests the next point (which is almost the same thing only more so) …
3 Irrelevance—of the actor, I mean. Just as, in the Wright sentence, the identity of the agent of the action is irrelevant, so it is in ‘The government has been re-elected’. We know who’s respon- sible for that—or do we?—if we live in a democracy, or indeed most other kinds of polity.When it is someone’s death I mean to tell you about, it may also be wrong (because immaterial at this point) to begin with the manner of the dying or the identity of the killers: ‘Denys has been killed’ says it about right when Denys Fitch-Hatton died in a plane crash. Mind you, one could write ‘Denys has died’, though that implies, curiously, less action than was the case.
4 Ignorance. It could be we don’t really know who killed Denys or who started the fire or who sank the boat that drowned the refugees. If not, I might write a sentence about it in the passive voice: ‘A fire has been deliberately started’; ‘The boat has been sunk’. Notice, though, that one could write ‘Someone has started a fire ... ’ in the active voice.
5 Inactivity of the subject. Rhetorically, for reasons of accuracy or poetry or politics, I may want you to understand that the subject of my sentence was inactive. Rendering your subject passive is the exactly the trick the passive construction performs on a sentence. So it may be the way to go: ‘The King Billy pines had been coloured and tempered by two millennia of bad weather’; ‘The player was approached by a man calling himself John.’ 6 Variety. If you set out to write mostly in the active voice, the
passive can be a pleasant change-up. Paragraphs thrive on diver- sity—of style and structure, length and voice.
7 Objectivity of tone.The passive will help you write objectively— to a fault. It overdoes it, really. And there are plenty of other ways. ‘The National Parks Act protects every form of life within the park’ sounds just as objective to me as ‘Every form of life in the park is protected (by the Act)’, but slightly less stuffy. ‘Guests are requested to vacate cabins by 10 am.Your assistance in leaving the hut clean and tidy would be appreciated’ sounds not just objective but plain awkward to me. How about: ‘Please vacate cabins by 10 am. Please leave them clean and tidy’?
The world is made of rock and music …
That sentence came to me on the bus today. We were passing through all these cuttings, and I began to notice how many different kinds of rock we were cutting through—dolerite, folded quartzites, sandstones (I think), maybe some basalt. I wrote: ‘The world is made of rock and music’. It may be the start of a poem. We’ll see.
But tonight, writing this section, I notice that my sentence is passive. Will I strike it out? I don’t think so. To name an actor in that
sentence would cause me to cover some contentious theological and scientific ground, and in doing so, I’d miss my point.Thinking about it, I see that I could make rocks my subject, thus: ‘Rock and music compose the world’. But that’s not the music of the thing I had in mind.
T RY T H I S
1 Write a paragraph in your journal. Write for five minutes about the last meal you made.Take a look back at it and find your verbs. See how many of them are passive. If any, see if you can rewrite those sentences actively.
2 Convert the following sentences from passive to active. First spot the passive verbal forms, then rewrite the sentence, making it active. One way to do this is to ask who, in real life, would have performed the verb. Make that person the subject of the sentence. Another way is to keep the subject of the passive sentence as your subject, but make it do something. (‘The staffer is learning writing skills’ in the example that follows.)
Example:
The staffer is coached by a writing teacher.
A writing teacher is coaching the research officer.
• It is recommended that suitable training be implemented across the department.
• The Commission was established by legislation enacted by Parliament in 2002.
• As soon as the Sydney Opera House was finished, it was adopted by Sydneysiders and lovers of good design the world over.
• Your inquiry has been received and will be responded to soon by one of our client service officers.
• The coastal township had been struck by another tropical cyclone.
• Our hospital in Ashfield was refurbished during the year. • This sentence should be written in the active voice.
4 Every time you meet the passive voice in your writing try to make it active. Going cold turkey on the passive helps you kick the nasty habit, if you had it, of writing in the passive voice without meaning to.