Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
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The word passive gets a bad rap. We throw it around to vent about friends who can’t stand up for themselves, and we combine it with aggressive to describe those who express anger indirectly rather than just blurting it out. When it comes to writing, many of us are haunted by this word. Maybe a high school teacher forbade “passive constructions.” Or we recall authorities like Strunk and White, who famously told us to “use the active voice.”
There is certainly some merit to this rule of thumb; some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.
But first, what, exactly, is it?
Most (though not all) verbs have a property known as “voice,” which can be either active or passive. The voice of a verb is different from both the common notion of voice (the timbre produced by a person’s vocal cords) and the literary notion (the ineffable way the writer’s words work on the page).
Joe MortisThe American Heritage Dictionary defines the grammatical notion of voice as the form of a verb that shows “the relation between the subject and the action expressed by the verb.” In the active voice, the subject performs the action. In the passive voice, the subject is acted upon.
In a classic English sentence in the active voice, the subject starts the show, followed by a dynamic verb. The subject is the agent, the person or thing taking the action: She reads. Sometimes there is a direct object: She reads “The Odyssey.” The sentence is pointed and precise. The action flows briskly from the subject, through the verb, to the object.
Let’s switch to the passive voice (and to some less intimidating reading). Here, the subject is the recipient of the action: Dr. Seuss is adored. The agent may lurk elsewhere in the sentence, perhaps in a phrase that begins with by, as in Dr. Seuss is adored by most children. (The children are doing the adoring.) The agent might also be assumed, or remembered from a previous sentence: Lucy brought “Hop on Pop” home from the library. It was read more than a dozen times. (We remember that Lucy brought the book home, so we figure she is a voracious reader — although her siblings might have sneaked a peek at the pages.) Finally, the agent might be unknown: The library book was carried upstairs. (Lucy might have been the carrier, but it might have been Mom, Dad or Aunt Leticia.)
When the passive voice makes sense
While we rarely want our sentences to flatten out, the passive voice can allow us to underscore intent and direct the reader’s attention.
For example, the passive voice works well when we intend to emphasize that a subject is not a “doer” but a “done-to.” When Germaine Greer, in “The Female Eunuch,” wanted to stress what a woman gave away in a traditional marriage, she used the passive voice:
“The married woman’s significance can only be conferred by the presence of a man at her side, a man upon whom she absolutely depends. In return for renouncing, collaborating, adapting, identifying, she is caressed, desired, handled, influenced.”
Greer underscored her point — that marriage saps a woman’s power, requiring her to trade active engagement for passively standing by — by putting those final verbs into the passive voice. By using the passive voice in the first sentence, Greer also kept our focus on the married woman, the most important part of her passage, instead of the presence of the man by her side.
Joe MortisThe passive voice is also useful when you don’t know who the agent is. We often see this in news stories. The baby was carried from the burning house works best when it’s clear that the baby survived unscathed but not whether a neighbor or a firefighter rescued her.
Finally, the passive voice can make for catchy rhythms in ads, telegrams or other terse forms. “Made in the U.S.A.” puts the emphasis on the where, not the who. And it fits on the label of a T-shirt better than “Farmers in Texas grew the cotton for this shirt, and seamstresses in a Los Angeles factory stitched it together.”
Joe MortisWhen, in 1897, Mark Twain heard that his obituary had been published, he cabled the United States from London. The often-quoted version of his cable relies on the passive voice for its punchline:
“THE REPORTS OF MY DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED”
The pitfalls of passive construction
The general, and often misleading, labels of “passive” and “passive construction” are often used to refer to everything from deploying listless verbs to overrelying on the passive voice. While I believe writers deserve maximum flexibility, it does help to pay attention to the most direct and dynamic way to cast a sentence.
Often a dynamic verb lurks in a clunky noun, and by excavating it we can perk up the prose. Why put in an appearance when you could just show up? Why write take into consideration instead of consider?
Such constructions are all too common in academic writing. This description of an anthropology program at the University of East London takes the life out of studying human life:
“It will be of relevance to those desirous of adding legal understandings to these perspectives. It will also be of interest to students wishing to proceed to a doctorate in the anthropology of human rights and related areas.”
Then there is the passive voice. Some people rely too heavily on it. When lawyers want to please the court, they follow scads of lawyers before them (The filing deadline was unintentionally missed). Business writers who want to stick to convention reflexively use the passive voice (The review of all positions has been completed). And C.E.O.s hide behind the passive voice after carrying out harsh actions (The work force has been downsized) or to blunt criticism (“Finally, it must be said that today’s economic crisis is the result of a lot of mistakes made by a lot of people …”).
Joe MortisThe most pilloried use of the passive voice might be that famous expression of presidents and press secretaries, “mistakes were made.” From Ronald Ziegler, President Richard M. Nixon’s press aide, through Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — not to mention Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — pols have used the passive voice to spin the news, avoid responsibility or hide the truth. One political guru even dubbed this usage “the past exonerative.”
Whether you are writing the next novel, a scholarly paper, a legal brief or a brief Tweet, be aware of the voice of your verbs. Try letting each sentence tell a little story, with an agent right there at the start. Set your protagonist in action. Do you want him, as Hamlet would say, “to take arms against a sea of troubles,” or would you rather he be left lying flat on his back, leaving his destiny up to someone else?
To experiment with the voice of verbs, try this little exercise: Find someone who is stuck waiting for something and watch how they wait. Perhaps it is a teenager waiting for a bus, or a customer in line at the post office. Perhaps it is a child, eager to open the birthday presents. Does the passive voice underscore the person’s passivity? Can you animate even passivity by using dynamic verbs in the active voice? What verbs do the trick? Which voice works best?
Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of “Sin and Syntax” and the forthcoming “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.” She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.
