Grammer a Week 21: Active vs. Passive Voice · 1:48pm May 4th, 2016
This is Grammer a Week, the periodic blog program-thing where I soapbox about a grammar subject I find interesting. You might, too! This week's installment is about the active and passive voice. You might have heard of this term before. Maybe your teacher told it to you, or maybe some well-meaning critic informed you that your entire story was written wrong. However you came to know this term, or even if you haven't, it's important to know how to use each voice and where.
Let's start with the basics: what is the active voice? It's definition is simple—so simple that it needs to be contrasted with the passive voice to mean much. Basically, the active voice is formed when the subject is doing an action to an object. In contrast, the passive voice is formed when the object is acted upon.
Applejack kicked the tree.
The tree was kicked by Applejack.
The first example is in the active voice, and the second is passive. In the first example, Applejack is doing the action [kicking] to the object [the tree]. In the second example, the object [the tree] is acted upon [kicking] by the subject.
You might have heard of this guideline before, but in general, it's a good idea to write most of a story in active voice because it has a lot of advantages over the passive voice in this application. It's much simpler in structure; It's more frugal with words; and it's more engaging to read.
Applejack wiped the sweat off her brow and picked up her load of apples. She took a peek at the sunset before hoisting the bucket of apples on her back and heading back to the barn.
The sweat off her brow was wiped by Applejack, and her load of apples was picked up. The sunset was peeked at by her before the bucket of apples was hoisted on her back and the barn was headed back to.
. . . Okay, that's a bit of an exaggerated example, but it makes my point that writing in the passive voice can make your writing seem affected or disjointed.
That being said, there are instances where using the passive voice is preferred, and those instances all revolve around one big advantage passive voice has over the active: in the passive voice, mentioning the subject is optional.
The tree was kicked.
Note that the sentence still makes sense even though I've completely omitted the subject (Applejack). Thus, the passive voice is preferred over the active voice in two broad situations: (1) when it's more important to draw attention to the object, and (2) when the subject is inconsequential or doesn't exist.
The cottage was destroyed in the tumultuous storm.
Meanwhile, a tornado could be seen brewing in the Everfree.*
In the first example, I feel it's more important to express that the cottage was destroyed than what was doing the destroying. Thus, I phrase the sentence in the passive voice to put the cottage first in the sentence. In the second example, there really isn't a clear subject: I'm expressing a situation that is true but don't need to specify the subject who's verifying it. It's just a statement of fact.
There's also something to be said about writing in other disciplines. When writing "politically," you can use the passive voice to decrease the importance of whoever is making the decision. And academic papers almost always have a lot of passive voice because the science is important, not its instigator.†
* I ran into this issue while constructing this blog post. Consider the sentence "A tornado was brewing in the Everfree." This is an interesting sentence that's sort of constructed like passive voice ("to be" followed by a verb) but is actually a deceptive and rather inactive active voice. Here, the root verb "to brew" is not actually acting as a verb; it's acting as an adjective in what's called the participle form. The word "tornado" is actually acting: it "is."
† Be wary if you're using passive voice too much in this discipline, though. Passive voice makes it easy to omit subjects, even when they're important. If "something is being concluded," sure, the conclusion is important, but sometimes, it is important to know who made that conclusion as well. I've gotten lots of TA notes on this, and I'm still working on it.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. I'm always open to suggestions for future Grammer a Week posts.
I'd say several of these are not just bad style but border on being ungrammatical (in the descriptive sense of "not something a native speaker would ever say").
Geoff Pullum tries to formulate some rules for when passives can actually be said in section 2.4 of this entertaining piece of polemic. I'm not sure his attempt is entirely successful, but at least it's a grasp for something more actionable than catch-all warnings against passives in general.
"The sweat off her brow was wiped by Applejack" feels like it violates Pullum's section 2.4.2: The by-phrase must introduce something new to the discourse. It's possible one can rules-lawyer it out of the scope of Pullum's formulation of the rule, but I think that's the rule's problem, not because it's a good sentence. The alternative "The sweat was wiped off her brow by Applejack" feels similarly wrong, but "The sweat was wiped off Applejack's brow by herself" would just barely work if (but only if) the goal was to point out that it wasn't someone else doing the wiping.
"The sunset was peeked at by her" and "the barn was headed back to" both seem to violate Pullum's section 2.4.1: "In prepositional passives of the locative type, the VP has to denote either a salient and significant property of the entity it is predicated of".
"Her load of apples was picked up" and "the bucket of apples was hoisted on her back" both pass my ear test -- though it's definitely bad style in both of them that the sentence goes out of its way to omit the actor without any good reason.
Rather than this constructed example, it would be more interesting to see some real in-the-wild examples of spurious passives in published fanfics. I don't doubt they must exist out there -- since all kinds of errors do -- but in my own experience they don't really seem to be common even in very bad fics. I wonder how real examples would measure up to Pullum's rules.
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You are completely right that my example was more-or-less something that would never actually be written unless the writer was trying to, well, make a point. The passive voice "errors" that I see are really only on the occasions when a writer slips into passive voice unnecessarily for a sentence or two.