Passively Active, Actively Passive
Use the active voice.
Strunk and White, Elements of Style, Principle 11.
The day a writer offered “she spoke into the microphone” as an example of the passive voice was the day I realized why so many people throw the passive voice around with abandon:they don’t know what it is! Much less do they understand how to use (or not use) it.
Because many authors live in innocence of the very existence of the passive voice and others see nothing wrong with it, you’re likely to experience times when authors reject your edits or try to argue you down. You need to know how to explain what the passive voice is, when to use it, and when not to use it.
The term passive voice applies to verbs (a verb is a word that shows the action in a sentence). A passive voice happens when the verb’s subject is acted upon rather than doing the action. The opposite of passive voice is active voice. In the active voice, the subject does the acting. In the examples that follow, let’s color theverbs red and theirsubjects blue.
Passive:
The bear was shot.(The subject has something done to it.)
Active:
Joe shot the bear. (The subject does something.)
FAQ: How can you tell the difference between the past tense and the passive voice?
Writers sometimes mistake thepast tense for thepassive voice, because the passive always contains a past participle (in this case, “shot”).Past participles sound a lot like simple past tense.
If the utterance contains the prepositional phrase “by(the person or thing that did the action)” or if it implies a prepositional phrase, “by xxx,” then it is in the passive voice.
The bear was shot.
Even though the words “by Joe” don’t appear explicitly, common sense tells us that the bear was shotby someone. The implicit message is “by xxx.” Therefore, this verb is in the passive voice.
The bear was shot by Joe.
Here, the sentences tells us explicitly that Joe did the shooting. Notice that in both sentences, the action happens to the bear. The action happens to the sentence’s subject, and the agent of the action is either implicit or explicit. Both sentences are in the passive voice.
Joe shot the bear.
This sentence is in the active voice. Why? Because the agent of the action is Joe.Joe is the subject of the verb.
When the subject does the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject receives the action, the verb is in the passive voice.
Some folks confuse verbs of being with the passive voice. If any of the words am, is, are, was, were, be, being, or been appears in a sentence, they think it’s in the passive voice. No. Forms of the word to be are used as the helping verb to form the passive voice. The passive voice looks like this:
subject + “to be” helping verb + past participle (-ed verb form) + by XXX.
A verb of being alone the passive voice does not make. Notice the much simpler structure:
She is an engineer.
He was tall and blond.
subject + be verb + predicate noun
subject + be verb + predicate adjective(s)
FAQ: What’s Strunk & White’s gripe with the passive voice?
Contrary to what many journalistic editors will tell you, Strunk and White never said you mustn’t use the passive voice. They said, “Use the active voice.” But in their discussion of principle 11, they point out that the passive voice is appropriate in some cases. Their argument in favor of consciously using the active voice when appropriate went this way:
The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind.
While writers should prefer the active to the passive voice most of the time, you’ll run into some circumstances where the passive is the better choice.
When the passive voice works:
Scientific writing
In some disciplines, it’s considered déclassé to draw attention to yourself in discussing research findings. So, the convention has authors write in the passive voice. Some journals supersede this and encourage their contributors to use “I” or “we” in narrating the results of their research.
Emphasis
The most emphatic position in the English sentence—and in the English paragraph—is at the end, not at the beginning. Because the passive voice puts the recipient of the action or the doer of the action at the end, it may be used to place the emphasis on one of these.
The bear was shot.
The bear was shot by Joe.
The structure alone—that is, use of the passive voice—allows the author to emphasize the means of the bear’s demise or the name of the perpetrator without having to resort to italics.
Buck-passing
The beauty of the passive voice is that you can state something happened without pointing a finger at the perpetrator.
Mistakes were made.
The bear was shot.
This characteristic—that the by XXX prepositional phrase may be implicit, left unsaid—makes the passive voice the darling of the bureaucratic writer. It allows you to admit to any number of caprices without shouldering any blame.
These are the uses of the passive voice, and, by extension, the reasons to prefer the active voice in most cases.
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