Friday Feature (on Sunday!): Passive Voice
What’s So Bad About the Passive Voice, Anyway?
The quick answer: lots.
This feature will explain what passive voice is and give tips and tricks for how to recognize (and change) the passive voice in writing. We’ll also discuss the times when passive voice might actually be a desirable technique to use.
What is passive voice?
In the English language, a verb can be either active or passive. This is called the “voice” of the verb. We identify voice by figuring out who or what is doing the action in a sentence and what object is receiving the action. Remember that in English, the typical order is “Subject - Verb - Direct Object.” There is a difference between the subject of a sentence and the do-er of the action, and there is a difference between the direct object and the object receiving an action. Keep this in mind as we move forward.
In the active voice, however, the do-er of the action is always the subject of the sentence, and the object receiving the action is always the direct object. Easy!
Harry cast the spell.
Kaylee will fix the engine.
The passive voice flips this order. In the passive voice, the object, the thing that’s receiving the action, becomes the subject of the sentence:
The spell was cast by Harry.
The engine will be fixed by Kaylee.
This is what passive voice looks like. Notice these things: (1) there is a form of “to be” in the sentence (was, is, etc), (2) there is a past tense verb (cast, fixed), and (3) there is a “by X” at the end. These are classic signals of the passive voice.
That still seems pretty straightforward, right? We still know that Harry is the one doing the action of casting the spell. The spell is still clearly the thing that’s being acted upon. But using passive voice can lead to confusing problems. Once you move the do-er to the end of the sentence, it’s very easy to drop the do-er out completely:
The spell was cast.
The engine will be fixed.
When the "by X" drops out, we lose one of our signals for the passive voice, but the sentence is still passive without it. You just have to think, "The spell was cast BY WHOM??" The fact that the "by X" isn't there should just flag the sentence even more, because now you don't know who did it. And of course who cast the spell can make a big difference depending on what kind of spell it is. Passive voice can also lead to excess wordiness in your writing and other sorts of confusion, which we’ll talk about more closely later on.
It’s a transitive thing
You’ll notice that the examples above all involve a subject, a verb, and a direct object. That’s because you can’t make a sentence passive without an object! That’s the way the passive voice works: the object moves up and becomes the subject of the sentence, even though it didn’t do anything to deserve to be there. The object just sat there, passively, while somebody else did the action. As your mother may have told you (I know mine told me), those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves. You need to wash them. They’re the object.
A sentence that has a subject, verb, and a direct object is a transitive sentence. A sentence that just has a subject and a verb is called intransitive. As we just saw, you can take an active transitive sentence and make it passive, by flipping the object to the subject position. You can almost define “a transitive sentence” as “a sentence that can be made passive”! The relationship is that strong, and there are only a few exceptions. You can’t make an intransitive sentence passive because there’s no object to flip:
Harry walked down the street.
Dumbledore died.
Those two sentences are active and intransitive: active because the person doing the action is the subject, intransitive because there isn’t an object.
Look back at our two passive sentences up above. What do you notice? They’re intransitive! Now that the object (the spell, the engine) has become the subject, there’s no direct object anymore. Most, but not all, passive sentences are going to be intransitive.
How many objects you got there?
What happens when you have more than one object in a sentence? I’m not just talking about a compound object here-you guys can follow that if Harry ate the apples and oranges, then the apples and oranges were eaten by Harry. No, I mean, what if there are two distinct objects in the sentence?
An “indirect object” is a part of the sentence that is the recipient or beneficiary of the direct object, the person to or for whom the action is performed. Here’s what it looks like in the active voice:
Hermione gave Harry the book.
You can tell that “Harry” is the indirect object because you can easily move him out of that position:
Hermione gave the book to Harry.
Harry is the recipient of the gift of the book, but he’s not the most important part of the sentence--the sentence is about Hermione giving a book (do-er, action, object). So what happens when we move this sentence into the passive voice?
Harry was given a book by Hermione.
The book was given to Harry by Hermione.
Wow! There are two different ways to make that sentence passive, because there are two different objects.
The first example, “Harry was given a book”, is both passive and transitive. Yes, it is. Take a close look at it. It’s definitely passive, because Harry’s just sitting there not doing anything--somebody else is the do-er who is giving the book. But the book is still the object, so it’s a transitive sentence. This is called a retained object--the sentence has been transformed from active to passive, but it has still retained an object.
This situation, where someone is giving or sending or delivering something to someone else, is just about the only time when you’ll see a transitive passive sentence. And what can you do to a transitive sentence? You can make it passive! Or, in this case, even more passive. And that’s how we get the second version, in which “the book was given”.
A note on “objects”
Remember that we are talking about direct objects and about objects that are being acted upon. We are talking about grammatical objects, not inanimate objects. If you see an inanimate object used as the subject of a sentence, don’t assume that it’s a passive sentence. An engine can rattle or hum or explode, a book can fascinate or bore its reader, and a spell can protect you or light up the sky. Inanimate objects can be do-ers in a sentence, and living creatures can have actions done to them.
A few more examples of passive voice
The sentences above were very simple examples of passive voice. Now that you’ve got the basic idea, let’s make sure you can spot a passive verb even when things are more complicated. I’m not going to explain the grammar behind these next few examples; I just want you to be able to recognize that these sentences involve a passive verb. I’ll put the active version in parentheses.
The engine had to be fixed. (Kaylee had to fix it.)
Can the engine be fixed? (Can Kaylee fix it?)
If the spell had been cast, we would have known by now. (If Harry had cast the spell, we would have known.)
The potions made by Professor Snape are always effective. (The potions Professor Snape makes are always effective. Or, more simply: Professor Snape always makes effective potions.)
That’s what it looks like, but why is it bad?
Well, passive voice isn’t necessarily bad. Passive voice is just a tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is that too often it’s used poorly, and it gets a bad rap.
Many people are taught that it’s unprofessional to write in the first person--for example, I was told never to use “I” in a research paper. A lot of scientific writing is full of the passive voice because scientists are taught to be objective, so they remove the “I” and “you” to remove the fallible human element. There's an effort being made to move away from this--the new convention is to use the active voice and first person plural ("We heated the samples" instead of "The samples were heated"), but I'm sure many older scientists will find it hard to make the switch.
You might see a lot of passive voice in news stories, too--for journalists, the focus on objectivity results in a lot of passive constructions, which just leads to confusion. A sentence like "The president has been advised that certain highly placed individuals are being investigated" is completely grammatically correct and also completely boring. Who advised him, and who’s conducting the investigation? Left to my own devices, I’m going to assume “Batman” and “ninja KGB spies”, but that might not be entirely accurate. It would be far better if the intrepid reporter had used the active voice to deliver real information about what’s going on.
Poor use of the passive voice leads to wordiness. Now, I’ll be the first to go out on a limb and say that words are pretty cool, but too many words can obscure what you’re trying to say and confuse your reader. In the example above about Professor Snape’s potions, the passive version has nine words while the final, most simple active version has only six. That’s a third fewer words, and a much clearer sentence. It may not seem like much, but over the course of a story, eliminating the passive can cut down your word count and help you make your points much more clearly.
Giving directions
One major area where the passive voice is detrimental is in giving directions. Here’s an example of horribly written instructions about programming your VCR.
Up to sixteen channels can be pretuned on the VCR for recording any channel while viewing any other channel offered by the cable TV system. However, only those channels which were pretuned can be recorded. When the VCR/TV button on the VCR is set to the TV mode, any channel you want to watch can be selected by utilizing the cable connector box.
Imagine you are sitting on the floor, trying to program your new VCR to tape the new episode of Heroes, and this is what your manual tells you. You’re going to get pretty frustrated, aren’t you? Now check out this revised version:
To record a program, you must first pretune the channel on the VCR. You can pretune up to 16 channels. While you are recording, you can watch any other channel your cable TV system offers. Press the VCR/TV button on the VCR to switch to TV mode, then use your cable connector box to select the channel you wish to watch.
All right, now we’re in business, watching CSI tonight while we tape Heroes to watch tomorrow! Look how much clearer that is, and all because we eliminated the passive voice.
Now you may say, but I don’t write VCR instruction manuals, I write fan fiction! But consider this. Someday, one of your characters may need to tell someone how to get to the library, or how to clean out the warp generator. A group of characters might need to make sneaky plans for how to infiltrate a heavily guarded facility, or how to pull off a complex theft operation. Even worse, in a crisis situation, a scientist character may have to tell someone over the phone how to defuse a bomb or identify a poisonous snake. Your characters could die because of your shoddy use of passive voice! Imagine your hunky hero looking perplexedly into the ticking suitcase while the scientist tells him the red wire could be crossed by the blue one. After the explosion, don’t forget to send your scientist off to a remedial grammar class.
Okay, we get it, but now how do we fix it?
You’ve probably figured this out already, but here’s how to revise passive voice to active voice. Let’s use this example sentence: The broomstick was grabbed by Harry.
1. Flip the verb and subject, dropping the “to be” form.
broomstick was grabbed becomes grabbed the broomstick
2. Move the actor, if present, before the verb, and drop “by”.
Harry grabbed the broomstick.
3. If no actor exists in the sentence, look for it in the surrounding text, or determine it from the context, if possible. If our original sentence hadn’t included “by Harry”, we could have substituted some other do-er that made sense, like “the wizard” or “the student”.
4. Sometimes, reversing the verb doesn’t work well or isn’t the best choice. Always consider that a better verb may exist. For example, in the VCR example above, I substituted “press the VCR/TV button” because it sounded clearer than the original verb, “the VCR/TV button is set”.
There are times when passive voice can be a good thing
If you’re going to use the passive voice, be knowledgeable about it, and have a reason for choosing it.
One of the most common good reasons for using passive voice is when the do-er of the action is unknown or doesn’t matter. One of Harry’s textbooks might state: "Giants have had a bad press. Their activities are equated with rape and pillage and their reputation for brutality is well known." Who gave them a bad press, who equates and who knows? Well, everyone. The use of the passive puts the statements in the category of accepted beliefs.
Maybe the do-er of the action is far off in history. Someone in the Firefly ‘verse might say, “Earth-that-was got used up and left behind.” Who did it? People, our ancestors, everybody, but it doesn’t matter, because the point is that we’re not there anymore, we’re out here on these sucky border planets.
Sometimes leaving out the do-er actually gets us to the point faster. Consider A security guard shot at Jayne Cobb versus Jayne Cobb was shot or the more colloquial Jayne got shot at! What’s important here is not who did the shooting. Everybody wants to shoot Jayne, after all. The use of passive here is simply more straightforward.
The passive voice can also be used to disguise the truth. When you tell your mother, “Oh, the dishes were washed,” she’s going to get suspicious, because you’re leaving the washer out of that sentence. Who washed the dishes? Maybe you did. Or maybe your brother did after you bullied him into it, or the dog did because you put the plates on the floor and he licked them off. Using the passive here is a purposeful avoidance of the truth. This could be useful if you’re writing a story with a character who has something to hide, or from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
Summing up
Overuse or poor use of the passive voice can cause wordiness and confusion, so use passive voice sparingly and with care. Watch for the tell-tale markers of passive voice: a form of “to be”, a past tense verb, and often a “by X” at the end. Correct unnecessary passive voice by flipping the verb and subject, dropping the “to be” form, and moving the do-er to the subject position.
References consulted:
Kolln, Martha and Funk, Robert. Understanding English Grammar, 5th ed. Needham, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998. Pages 72-78, 352-355.
McCarthy, Christine J. Coursepak for “Editing Technical Prose”, Harvard Extension School, Fall 2005.
The quick answer: lots.
This feature will explain what passive voice is and give tips and tricks for how to recognize (and change) the passive voice in writing. We’ll also discuss the times when passive voice might actually be a desirable technique to use.
What is passive voice?
In the English language, a verb can be either active or passive. This is called the “voice” of the verb. We identify voice by figuring out who or what is doing the action in a sentence and what object is receiving the action. Remember that in English, the typical order is “Subject - Verb - Direct Object.” There is a difference between the subject of a sentence and the do-er of the action, and there is a difference between the direct object and the object receiving an action. Keep this in mind as we move forward.
In the active voice, however, the do-er of the action is always the subject of the sentence, and the object receiving the action is always the direct object. Easy!
Harry cast the spell.
Kaylee will fix the engine.
The passive voice flips this order. In the passive voice, the object, the thing that’s receiving the action, becomes the subject of the sentence:
The spell was cast by Harry.
The engine will be fixed by Kaylee.
This is what passive voice looks like. Notice these things: (1) there is a form of “to be” in the sentence (was, is, etc), (2) there is a past tense verb (cast, fixed), and (3) there is a “by X” at the end. These are classic signals of the passive voice.
That still seems pretty straightforward, right? We still know that Harry is the one doing the action of casting the spell. The spell is still clearly the thing that’s being acted upon. But using passive voice can lead to confusing problems. Once you move the do-er to the end of the sentence, it’s very easy to drop the do-er out completely:
The spell was cast.
The engine will be fixed.
When the "by X" drops out, we lose one of our signals for the passive voice, but the sentence is still passive without it. You just have to think, "The spell was cast BY WHOM??" The fact that the "by X" isn't there should just flag the sentence even more, because now you don't know who did it. And of course who cast the spell can make a big difference depending on what kind of spell it is. Passive voice can also lead to excess wordiness in your writing and other sorts of confusion, which we’ll talk about more closely later on.
It’s a transitive thing
You’ll notice that the examples above all involve a subject, a verb, and a direct object. That’s because you can’t make a sentence passive without an object! That’s the way the passive voice works: the object moves up and becomes the subject of the sentence, even though it didn’t do anything to deserve to be there. The object just sat there, passively, while somebody else did the action. As your mother may have told you (I know mine told me), those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves. You need to wash them. They’re the object.
A sentence that has a subject, verb, and a direct object is a transitive sentence. A sentence that just has a subject and a verb is called intransitive. As we just saw, you can take an active transitive sentence and make it passive, by flipping the object to the subject position. You can almost define “a transitive sentence” as “a sentence that can be made passive”! The relationship is that strong, and there are only a few exceptions. You can’t make an intransitive sentence passive because there’s no object to flip:
Harry walked down the street.
Dumbledore died.
Those two sentences are active and intransitive: active because the person doing the action is the subject, intransitive because there isn’t an object.
Look back at our two passive sentences up above. What do you notice? They’re intransitive! Now that the object (the spell, the engine) has become the subject, there’s no direct object anymore. Most, but not all, passive sentences are going to be intransitive.
How many objects you got there?
What happens when you have more than one object in a sentence? I’m not just talking about a compound object here-you guys can follow that if Harry ate the apples and oranges, then the apples and oranges were eaten by Harry. No, I mean, what if there are two distinct objects in the sentence?
An “indirect object” is a part of the sentence that is the recipient or beneficiary of the direct object, the person to or for whom the action is performed. Here’s what it looks like in the active voice:
Hermione gave Harry the book.
You can tell that “Harry” is the indirect object because you can easily move him out of that position:
Hermione gave the book to Harry.
Harry is the recipient of the gift of the book, but he’s not the most important part of the sentence--the sentence is about Hermione giving a book (do-er, action, object). So what happens when we move this sentence into the passive voice?
Harry was given a book by Hermione.
The book was given to Harry by Hermione.
Wow! There are two different ways to make that sentence passive, because there are two different objects.
The first example, “Harry was given a book”, is both passive and transitive. Yes, it is. Take a close look at it. It’s definitely passive, because Harry’s just sitting there not doing anything--somebody else is the do-er who is giving the book. But the book is still the object, so it’s a transitive sentence. This is called a retained object--the sentence has been transformed from active to passive, but it has still retained an object.
This situation, where someone is giving or sending or delivering something to someone else, is just about the only time when you’ll see a transitive passive sentence. And what can you do to a transitive sentence? You can make it passive! Or, in this case, even more passive. And that’s how we get the second version, in which “the book was given”.
A note on “objects”
Remember that we are talking about direct objects and about objects that are being acted upon. We are talking about grammatical objects, not inanimate objects. If you see an inanimate object used as the subject of a sentence, don’t assume that it’s a passive sentence. An engine can rattle or hum or explode, a book can fascinate or bore its reader, and a spell can protect you or light up the sky. Inanimate objects can be do-ers in a sentence, and living creatures can have actions done to them.
A few more examples of passive voice
The sentences above were very simple examples of passive voice. Now that you’ve got the basic idea, let’s make sure you can spot a passive verb even when things are more complicated. I’m not going to explain the grammar behind these next few examples; I just want you to be able to recognize that these sentences involve a passive verb. I’ll put the active version in parentheses.
The engine had to be fixed. (Kaylee had to fix it.)
Can the engine be fixed? (Can Kaylee fix it?)
If the spell had been cast, we would have known by now. (If Harry had cast the spell, we would have known.)
The potions made by Professor Snape are always effective. (The potions Professor Snape makes are always effective. Or, more simply: Professor Snape always makes effective potions.)
That’s what it looks like, but why is it bad?
Well, passive voice isn’t necessarily bad. Passive voice is just a tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is that too often it’s used poorly, and it gets a bad rap.
Many people are taught that it’s unprofessional to write in the first person--for example, I was told never to use “I” in a research paper. A lot of scientific writing is full of the passive voice because scientists are taught to be objective, so they remove the “I” and “you” to remove the fallible human element. There's an effort being made to move away from this--the new convention is to use the active voice and first person plural ("We heated the samples" instead of "The samples were heated"), but I'm sure many older scientists will find it hard to make the switch.
You might see a lot of passive voice in news stories, too--for journalists, the focus on objectivity results in a lot of passive constructions, which just leads to confusion. A sentence like "The president has been advised that certain highly placed individuals are being investigated" is completely grammatically correct and also completely boring. Who advised him, and who’s conducting the investigation? Left to my own devices, I’m going to assume “Batman” and “ninja KGB spies”, but that might not be entirely accurate. It would be far better if the intrepid reporter had used the active voice to deliver real information about what’s going on.
Poor use of the passive voice leads to wordiness. Now, I’ll be the first to go out on a limb and say that words are pretty cool, but too many words can obscure what you’re trying to say and confuse your reader. In the example above about Professor Snape’s potions, the passive version has nine words while the final, most simple active version has only six. That’s a third fewer words, and a much clearer sentence. It may not seem like much, but over the course of a story, eliminating the passive can cut down your word count and help you make your points much more clearly.
Giving directions
One major area where the passive voice is detrimental is in giving directions. Here’s an example of horribly written instructions about programming your VCR.
Up to sixteen channels can be pretuned on the VCR for recording any channel while viewing any other channel offered by the cable TV system. However, only those channels which were pretuned can be recorded. When the VCR/TV button on the VCR is set to the TV mode, any channel you want to watch can be selected by utilizing the cable connector box.
Imagine you are sitting on the floor, trying to program your new VCR to tape the new episode of Heroes, and this is what your manual tells you. You’re going to get pretty frustrated, aren’t you? Now check out this revised version:
To record a program, you must first pretune the channel on the VCR. You can pretune up to 16 channels. While you are recording, you can watch any other channel your cable TV system offers. Press the VCR/TV button on the VCR to switch to TV mode, then use your cable connector box to select the channel you wish to watch.
All right, now we’re in business, watching CSI tonight while we tape Heroes to watch tomorrow! Look how much clearer that is, and all because we eliminated the passive voice.
Now you may say, but I don’t write VCR instruction manuals, I write fan fiction! But consider this. Someday, one of your characters may need to tell someone how to get to the library, or how to clean out the warp generator. A group of characters might need to make sneaky plans for how to infiltrate a heavily guarded facility, or how to pull off a complex theft operation. Even worse, in a crisis situation, a scientist character may have to tell someone over the phone how to defuse a bomb or identify a poisonous snake. Your characters could die because of your shoddy use of passive voice! Imagine your hunky hero looking perplexedly into the ticking suitcase while the scientist tells him the red wire could be crossed by the blue one. After the explosion, don’t forget to send your scientist off to a remedial grammar class.
Okay, we get it, but now how do we fix it?
You’ve probably figured this out already, but here’s how to revise passive voice to active voice. Let’s use this example sentence: The broomstick was grabbed by Harry.
1. Flip the verb and subject, dropping the “to be” form.
broomstick was grabbed becomes grabbed the broomstick
2. Move the actor, if present, before the verb, and drop “by”.
Harry grabbed the broomstick.
3. If no actor exists in the sentence, look for it in the surrounding text, or determine it from the context, if possible. If our original sentence hadn’t included “by Harry”, we could have substituted some other do-er that made sense, like “the wizard” or “the student”.
4. Sometimes, reversing the verb doesn’t work well or isn’t the best choice. Always consider that a better verb may exist. For example, in the VCR example above, I substituted “press the VCR/TV button” because it sounded clearer than the original verb, “the VCR/TV button is set”.
There are times when passive voice can be a good thing
If you’re going to use the passive voice, be knowledgeable about it, and have a reason for choosing it.
One of the most common good reasons for using passive voice is when the do-er of the action is unknown or doesn’t matter. One of Harry’s textbooks might state: "Giants have had a bad press. Their activities are equated with rape and pillage and their reputation for brutality is well known." Who gave them a bad press, who equates and who knows? Well, everyone. The use of the passive puts the statements in the category of accepted beliefs.
Maybe the do-er of the action is far off in history. Someone in the Firefly ‘verse might say, “Earth-that-was got used up and left behind.” Who did it? People, our ancestors, everybody, but it doesn’t matter, because the point is that we’re not there anymore, we’re out here on these sucky border planets.
Sometimes leaving out the do-er actually gets us to the point faster. Consider A security guard shot at Jayne Cobb versus Jayne Cobb was shot or the more colloquial Jayne got shot at! What’s important here is not who did the shooting. Everybody wants to shoot Jayne, after all. The use of passive here is simply more straightforward.
The passive voice can also be used to disguise the truth. When you tell your mother, “Oh, the dishes were washed,” she’s going to get suspicious, because you’re leaving the washer out of that sentence. Who washed the dishes? Maybe you did. Or maybe your brother did after you bullied him into it, or the dog did because you put the plates on the floor and he licked them off. Using the passive here is a purposeful avoidance of the truth. This could be useful if you’re writing a story with a character who has something to hide, or from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
Summing up
Overuse or poor use of the passive voice can cause wordiness and confusion, so use passive voice sparingly and with care. Watch for the tell-tale markers of passive voice: a form of “to be”, a past tense verb, and often a “by X” at the end. Correct unnecessary passive voice by flipping the verb and subject, dropping the “to be” form, and moving the do-er to the subject position.
References consulted:
Kolln, Martha and Funk, Robert. Understanding English Grammar, 5th ed. Needham, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998. Pages 72-78, 352-355.
McCarthy, Christine J. Coursepak for “Editing Technical Prose”, Harvard Extension School, Fall 2005.