3.6: The Passive Voice Should be Avoided

Author: Collin Gifford Brooke, Syracuse University.

Many of the rules that we find in writing handbooks are customs or personal preferences that, over time, pass from the realm of advice to proscription. Some are grounded in the differences between spoken and written language, whereas others represent the stylistic or aesthetic tastes of their inventors. While rules in general may vary with time, place, and genre, the directive that we should “use the active voice,” in the words of Strunk and White, is so common (and so enthusiastically repeated) that it might as well be universal. This hostility to the passive voice, however, is misplaced. Active verbs are often our first, best choice when writing, but truly skilled writers know how to use passive verbs effectively, rather than ignoring them out of hand.

What is the passive voice? In linguistics, active and passive are technical terms used to describe verbs and their position within a sentence with respect to subjects and objects. This in turn is the voice of a verb, although this category tends to bleed over into broader claims about the sentences or passages where the verbs appear. Verbs in the passive voice simply reverse the subject-verbobject arrangement of the typical English sentence (e.g., where an object is verbed by a subject). Unlike in Latin, where it is a matter of different verb endings, the passive voice in English typically requires a helping verb, making the sentence longer in addition to altering its construction.

The technical details of the passive voice, however, do not really explain the hostility that many have for it. Some of the distaste for passive verb structures comes from the cultural associations that the terms active and passive carry. In Strunk and White, for example, active verbs are characterized variously as direct, vigorous, bold, concise, forcible, lively, and emphatic. While some of these characterizations are correct, considering that an indirect sentence structure is often longer, they also carry implicit judgments that make the passive voice seem less desirable. And passive has become a generalized term used to label writing perceived as weak; as linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum observes, “people are simply tossing the term ‘passive’ around when they want to cast aspersions on pieces of writing that, for some ineffable reason, they don’t care for.” As one of the writers for the popular linguistics site Language Log, Pullum has gathered dozens of examples of such denunciations, most of which misidentify the passive voice in the process of condemning it.

If there is one quality of the passive voice that seems to deserve that condemnation, however, it is the way that it can be used to obscure responsibility or accountability. The classic example of this is the difference between “I made a mistake” and “Mistakes were made.” Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the latter conceals the agent of the mistake. The passive voice, we might say, allows speakers or writers to hide behind language, by directing attention away from their involvement or responsibility in a situation. For example, on October 21, 2015, the New York Times published an op-ed by Ellen Bresler Rockmore titled “How Texas Teaches History.” Rockmore’s editorial is primarily concerned with the ways that the horrors of slavery are downplayed in history textbooks approved by the Texas Board of Education. One of the methods employed to do so, according to Rockmore, is the textbooks’ frequent reliance on passive voice. “Through grammatical manipulation,” she writes, “the textbook authors obscure the role of slave owners in the institution of slavery.”

Rockmore is not alone in supposing that “grammatical choices can be moral choices.” Both Slate (“Why Scientists Need to Give Up on the Passive Voice”) and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (“An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar”) published high-profile (and much-shared) recommendations against the passive voice in 2015. Jacob Brogan, author of the Slate article, argues that passive voice is less a matter of morality than effectiveness: “The passive voice makes storytelling more difficult because it hides the characters deep in the sentence—if it shows them at all.” Although less dramatic than Rockmore’s diagnosis, Brogan’s complaint is otherwise similar. Whether conceived as historical agents or characters in a story, the passive voice minimizes or obscures their participation in the activity described by the sentence.

Pullum is skeptical of such claims, however, noting that “the belief that the passive necessarily embodies such qualities [e.g., vagueness, avoidance] is transparently false.” He explains that there are “plenty of other ways” to obscure agency or responsibility. To say that “mistakes happened” is no less evasive than “mistakes were made,” but only the latter employs a passive verb. And in circumstances where responsibility is distributed throughout a complex web of agents, concrete subjects and active verbs might themselves be ultimately misleading. To return to our earlier example, Rockmore identifies the Texas Board of Education and the textbook authors (employed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) as chiefly responsible for the distorting language of the history textbook. Both parties certainly share some of the culpability, but “How Texas Teaches History” doesn’t adequately capture the degree to which federal education policy, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, has fostered this outcome. It may be expedient to single out Texas, but textbook content across the nation is determined by a combination of politically appointed state officials and profit-driven corporate education vendors, both responding to broader circumstances. Rockmore herself seems to sense this, as she resorts to the passive voice in her final paragraph, noting that “The textbook publishers were put in a difficult position.”

My point here is not to call Rockmore out; rather, I want to suggest the moral implications of our grammatical choices are not intrinsic to the grammar itself. Writing that emphasizes the concrete actions of specific agents can blind us to broader, systemic issues, just as easily as indirect prose obscures those agents’ roles. Rather than assuming that the passive voice is somehow immoral, weak, or dishonest, we should instead ask what it is that passive verbs allow us to accomplish.

As we observed above, passive verbs alter the subject-object sequence in a written sentence; this is perhaps their most immediate impact on prose. Reaching back to Strunk and White and beyond, critiques of the passive voice frequently provide several examples of this effect, presenting sentences side-by-side to demonstrate how preferable active verbs are. When we consider a single sentence, more often than not, the most direct version will appear to be the better option. Outside of Twitter, though, we do not write in single sentences. Our prose is much more likely to happen in paragraphs and pages, and the passive voice plays an important role here as well.

Joseph M. Williams argues in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace that readable prose is more than simply finding the best sentence in each case. Installed in paragraphs, sentences relate to and depend upon each other; what may seem to be the better alternative when viewed in isolation may ruin a paragraph’s cohesion, the degree to which the sentences flow and hold together. Cohesion is achieved, explains Williams, when sentences maintain a balance between given and new information, beginning with the former and ending with the latter. Beginning a sentence with information that is already established in readers’ minds allows them to perceive connections and to add new information atop that foundation. Sentences that don’t follow the given-new structure will seem choppy and disconnected, requiring additional work on the part of readers to forge the connections among them.

For Williams, cohesion among sentences takes priority over any injunction against the passive voice. He counsels writers to focus instead on context, and to choose the voice best suited for it. Williams provides a number of examples, including the following: “Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists exploring the nature of black holes. A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble.” The appearance of the phrase “black hole” at the end of the first sentence as well as the beginning of the second provides cohesion. Revising the second sentence to feature an active verb (“The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates a black hole.”) makes little sense in that context. Given how much distance such a revision would introduce between the subject and verb of the sentence, it is doubtful that the active voice improves the sentence, even in isolation.

We can return one final time to Rockmore’s essay, and examine the first sentence of her final paragraph (“The textbook publishers were put in a difficult position.”) in context. Two of the three preceding paragraphs make specific reference to “the textbook authors” and “the authors” respectively. The new information layered into the sentence actually circles back to the politics discussed earlier in the essay. This small sentence manages both to provide cohesion in the immediate context of the final paragraphs and to supply overall coherence by connecting two of the primary agents that the op-ed considers (the Board of Education and the textbook publishers).

The passive voice can certainly be abused, but in the hands of a skilled writer (like Rockmore), it is an invaluable strategy. There is nothing intrinsically weak, evasive, or bureaucratic about the passive voice, nor anything about it that makes a sentence necessarily inferior. The passive voice is appropriate in some contexts and less so in others, but this is a matter for a writer’s judgment rather than a rule to be (dis)obeyed. We should be teaching writers the skilled application of the passive voice, rather than teaching them to avoid it altogether. Understanding sentences in context rather than isolation would allow writers to take up questions of cohesion and coherence.

Further Reading

For more on how passive voice is treated in style guides and handbooks, see Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (any edition) and Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (also any edition). For the way passive voice is used to promote doublespeak in political and scientific rhetoric, see George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays; Vijith Assar’s “An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar” in the September 3, 2015, edition of McSweeney’s; Jacob Brogan’s “Why Scientists Need to Give Up on the Passive Voice” in the April 1, 2015, issue of Slate; and Ellen Bresler Rockmore’s New York Times story on “How Texas Teaches History” (Oct., 21, 2015). For peer-reviewed research on the trouble with passive voice, see Geoffrey Pullum’s “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive” in Language and Communication (July 2014).

Keywords

active voice, cohesion, grammar, mechanics, passive voice, sentences

Author Bio

Collin Gifford Brooke is an associate professor in the writing program at Syracuse University. He studies the impact of contemporary technology on writing and language. He has taught college level writing for nearly 25 years.