CHAPTER

THE PROBLEM

Would you describe yourself as active or passive?  Are you do things, or do you let things be done to you?  Most of us (the authors included) like to think of ourselves as taking charge, not as meek followers and unquestioning order-takers.  We tend to think of being active as something good, and passivity as a kind of weakness or liability.  People who are active are energetic, they’re powerful, they get the job done.

This is exactly what you want your writing to do.

When it doesn’t, your instructor is likely to make a note of the fact with the words “passive voice” or the abbreviation “PAS.”  Consider these sentences:

• The lawn had been trimmed by a flock of enterprising sheep.
• The lunch will be prepared by our cook, Tatiana.
• Several laws radically curtailing public frog racing have been passed.

Do you have a sense of what’s “off” here?  Let’s have a closer look.

WHAT PASSIVE VOICE IS AND HOW IT WORKS

“Voice” in grammar applied to verbs and indicates whether the subject of a sentence is acting or is being acted upon.  The most basic word-order pattern in English is subject-verb-object.  When verbs are in their active voice , someone or something (subject) of the sentence performs an action (verb) upon something (object).

• Clarice booked a cruise through the swamps of Louisiana.

However, in sentences in the passive voice, the normal positions of subject and object are reversed.

• A cruise through the swamps of Louisiana was booked by Clarice.

The former subject becomes an object, and the former object become a subject; in other words, in the first sentence the subject is acting and so is “active,” while in the second sentence the subject is not acting and so is “passive.”

This is how you recognize a verb in passive voice:

1. You’ll see a form of the verb to be (be, being, am, is, are, was, were, will be, have been, has been, had been, will have been).
2. You’ll see a past participle, the verb form that ends in -ed, -en, -d, -t, -(e)n, or -n(e). (If you’d like to know about past participles, see the Chapter on Verbs and Verbals.)
3. Usually – though not always! – you’ll find a prepositional phrase beginning with

A verb is in passive voice when it has at least the first two of these three characteristics.

Just as we think that being active is a better quality than being passive, sentences in active voice tend to be more vigorous, more direct, than sentences in passive voice.  In fact, excessive use of passive voice weakens sentences and overall writing.  And yet we’ve noticed something odd in our years of teaching, and that is that most students use passive voice only rarely in their speaking; indeed, many people (we think of ourselves when we first wrestled with the concept) have some difficulty at first in grasping the concept of passive voice.

And yet, when people write, suddenly all their verbs “flip” from active to passive.  Instead of “Last week my bowling team won a stunning pewter trophy,” we find “A stunning pewter trophy was won by my bowling team.”  Why?  In both of these sentences, who’s winning?  And what are they winning?  And which sentence says this more clearly, more directly?  Most experienced writers prefer the first sentence, the active one.

Note that passive voice has nothing to do with past tense.  While verbs have both passive and past  forms, as noted above, “voice” refers to action, and “tense” refers to time.  The structure of passive  voice, to be sure, involves the past participle of a verb, but verbs of any tense can be passive – for example,

• Every day the mail is brought in by our loyal butler, Walser. (“is” = present tense)
• The door prizes will be distributed by that large man in the Godzilla suit. (“will be” = future tense)

In identifying the passive voice, don’t confuse the present-progressive form of a verb with the passive voice.  Present progressive forms contain a form of the very “to be” plus a present participle (a verb form ending in -ing):

• Jackie is upgrading a personal version of the Doomsday Device.

Passive voice, however. contains a form of the verb “to be” plus a past participle:

• A personal version of the Doomsday Device is being upgraded by Jackie.

In both these sentences, ask yourself, Who’s doing the upgrading?  Jackie.  And which sentence has Jackie in the subject position?  The first one.  So you know that sentence must be in active voice.

THE SOLUTIONS

As we note above, when you use passive voice inappropriately, your instructor is likely to mark the error with “PAS,” for passive voice.  What to do?

Solution 01

The easiest – and thus often the best – solution is simply to convert the sentence from passive voice into active by “flipping” the subject and whatever follows the “by” (the object):

• passive voice: The lawn had been trimmed by a flock of enterprising sheep.
• active voice: A flock of enterprising sheep had trimmed the lawn.

Keep your new active verb in the same tense (verb time) as the old passive verb.  If the original verb was in future tense, for example, then the new verb must be in future tense as well.

• passive voice: The lunch will be prepared (future) by our cook, Tatiana.
• active voice: Our cook, Tatiana, will prepare (future) the lunch.

Solution 02

The second solution isn’t so very different from the first.  You may find that your sentence using passive voice is missing a “by” – for instance,

• passive voice: Several laws radically curtailing public frog racing have been passed.

Thus, when you “flip” the sentence to make it active, you’ll have

• active voice: [blank] have been passed several laws radically curtailing public frog racing

In other word, missing a by and noun (by what / by whom) means that have nothing to put as the new subject.  In a case such as this, ask yourself, By whom?  Whatever you choose to follow the “by” will become the subject of your converted sentence, so you need to be sure to pick something logical.  In this sentence, you can answer the question “by whom?” with “by the members of the village council” (or something similarly logical):

• passive voice: Several laws radically curtailing public frog racing have been passed by the members of village council.

Your converted sentence would then be

• active voice: The members of the village council have passed several laws radically curtailing public frog racing

Are we suggesting that you never, under any circumstances, use passive voice in writing ?  Of course not:  passive voice is a useful tool, and if it weren’t essential to language, we’d never have developed it.  What we do suggest, however, is that you use passive voice not out of laziness or ignorance but rather that you make the best use of it.

One use is for variety and interest in your writing.  If you rely exclusively on active voiced, your reader may soon grow weary of what seems like stale repetition and lack of imagination.  It’s perfectly appropriate – recommended, even – to add a little spice to your sentence by the occasional and well-placed use of passive voice.

There’s another instance in which passive voice may be the best choice.  Say you’re talking with your boss down at Candy-Coated Vegetables, Inc.  You know there’s a problem in one of the divisions, and you want to bring this to your boss’s attention.  So you write a memo in which you include the following sentence:

• I was told by Shoshana, the supervisor, that our Candied Turnip Division is in severe disorder.

But won’t giving away the identity of your “informer” potentially get her into trouble?  Might the boss not call her in and give her what’s for?  Safer, probably, to write merely

• I was told that our Candied Turnip Division is in severe disorder.

This way, you don’t but anyone on the spot.  You passive voice whenever you don’t want to give away the identity of the actor in the sentence.

ANALOGY

In most of life, voice refers to that part of the body that allows us to speak. When we say that someone has a voice, we often mean that he or she has the ability to make opinions known. When we say that certain people have found their voice, it means they have found a way to speak and take action. So it may not be surprising that, in grammar, voice is what lets the reader or hearer figure out who is doing the speaking or acting in a sentence.

The focus of this chapter is on passive voice. To understand passive voice, we have taken a look at active voice, its clearer counterpart. If these concepts are not yet making perfect sense to you try on this analogy.

Imagine someone is leaving notes for you at your desk without signing a name to them. This phantom note-leaver might be discovered in any number of ways. But let’s say that you cannot catch the person sneaking in or out. You cannot match the ink or the paper to those on someone’s desk nearby. So you begin looking for clues within the messages themselves. You might pay attention to how he or she chooses the words of the note or arranges them in sentences. The word order will give you something to listen to in office conversation, a clue to the voice of your phantom note-writer, so that you can match the patterns of the note with the patterns of speech.

• A note was left on Wanda Power’s desk.

The subject, a note, comes before the verb, was left, but reveals no actor.

• A second note was discovered two days later by Wanda herself.

The subject, a second note, comes before the verb, was discovered, but reveals no actor. Oh, how Wanda wishes she knew the actor. She really wants a sentence that reads

______________ left the notes on Wanda’s desk.

The order of the words in your sentences will reveal something to your readers, too. Placing the subject (or actor or agent) in front of the verb that the subject is doing will make clear to your readers that the subject is doing the verb. This word order is common, clear, and usually decipherable by readers. We refer to it as active voice. The subject of the sentence is the actor. The subject is actively doing or being something. Wanda’s desire to see the blank filled in in the sentence above would give her an active voice sentence and the solution to the mystery.

Using a different word order will in fact communicate something different to your readers. That’s good. You would expect a different order to have a different effect. Placing the actor, the one who is doing the verb, somewhere after the verb, placing the actor in a prepositional phrase, or leaving the actor out of the sentence altogether will cause your readers to understand that some action has been done, but perhaps by a phantom agent.  The first two sentences above are just such sentences.

• A note was left on Wanda Power’s desk.
• A second note was discovered two days later by Wanda herself.

This word order in a sentence, beginning with a subject that hasn’t done anything (or even to whom something has been done-the victim of the action, if you like), followed by the verb, and then perhaps followed by the actor (but perhaps not) is a classic case of passive voice. If you want to set up a mystery, passive voice is your tool. If you want to turn your readers’ expectations for clarity upside down, passive voice is the voice to use. And occasionally, if the doer of the action is completely irrelevant, passive voice is a perfectly legitimate voice to use.

Most business writing and in fact most good writing in any field demands as much clarity and information as quickly as possible. Why play games with your reader and produce phantom agents. Getting to the point, as the song says, is often the hardest part, but good use of the system of language demands that we do it well. Choose to do it well and check your writing to be sure the only phantoms you include are those you put there intentionally for interest or variety.

THE BASICS:  PASSIVE VOICE

• WHAT IS IT? “Voice” in grammar indicates whether the subject in a sentence is acting or is acted upon.  Sentences in active voice show the normal English sentence pattern of a someone or something (the subject) doing something (verb) to someone or something (object).  In sentences in passive voice, the subject has something done to it by someone or something.
• WHEN DO YOU USE IT? As a general rule, you don’t, as it tends to weaken sentences or render them vague.  You may, however, choose to use passive once in a while, either to vary your sentence patterns or to protect the identity of the actor in a sentence.
• WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? Passive sentences contain the following:

1. a form of the verb to be (be, being, am, is, are, was, were, will be, have been, has been, had been, will have been).
2. a past participle, the verb form that ends in -ed, -en, -d, -t, -(e)n, or -n(e)
3. often a prepositional phrase beginning with by.

To convert sentences from passive voice into active voice, you “flip” the subject and whatever follows the “by,” making sure to stay in the same verb tense.  If there is no “by” in the sentence, you must supply one in order to convert the sentence.

EXERCISE

Rewrite the sentences in passive voice so that they’re in active voice.  Not all the sentences need to be corrected!

1. “You’ll want to try one of the chocolate covered onions,” said my great aunt Mara, with quiet confidence. “They were baked by Cousin Eula for this very family reunion!”
2. Hazel quickly learned that the key to winning any game of Toss the Porcupine is not to ignore the warnings given by the referee.
3. The triplets have promised an orderly game of checkers, with neither cruel name-calling or wrestling moves.
4. At our apartment, the person who must clean the bathroom is determined by the ouija board.
5. Tim has been told by a psychic medium to avoid eating foods of the same color, like radishes and raspberries.
6. “I’m going to have a makeover that a real professional has done!” declared Ermengarde. “And not someone who uses condiments as hair conditioners,” she added, with an angry look at me and the empty jar of mayonnaise.
7. The signup sheet for the field trip to the twist-tie factory will be posted no later than Thursday at noon.
8. Moments before her class presentation on synchronized swimming, Abbie discovered that her charts had been accidentally deleted by her boyfriend, Max; instead, she had 25 photos of Max dressed as a cyborg for Halloween.
9. Rutabaga leaves are well known to provide relief for fatigue, rashes, and bloating.
10. We were startled to discover that the coffee that had been brewed that morning by Doris contained diet soda.

QUIZ

Passive Voice Quiz and Key