Common Grammar Mistakes Part Five: Passive Voice

A common grammar mistake a lot of people make, myself included, is overuse of passive voice. Passive voice means that the sentence shows an action happening to the subject, rather than the subject taking the action. This is not technically an error, but stylistically, it is a weak form of writing that can be unnecessarily verbose and even confusing to read. Writing in the active voice will make your writing stronger, clearer, and more direct.

How do I recognize passive voice?

Examples

Passive:
The ball was thrown to John.
John had the ball thrown to him by Bill.

In both cases, John is the subject of the sentence, and he is also the direct object. Rather than being the one to take action, something is happening to John. In order to make these sentences active, we need to restructure them somewhat. There are different ways this can be done, but following are a couple of examples.

Active:
John caught the ball. (In this case, John is taking action by catching the ball. This is a complete rewording from "The ball was thrown to John," but the end result is the same. It can probably be assumed that someone threw the ball to John, since he caught it. However, you have to make sure that your rewording fits into your context.)

Bill threw the ball to John. (In this rewrite of "John had the ball thrown to him by Bill," I have turned the sentence around so that Bill is now the subject and John is the direct object.)

Note how the active voice sentences are shorter and more direct than the passive voice examples.

What passive voice is not

Some people think that any time you use the verb "to be" (is, am, are, was, were, etc.) the sentence is in passive voice. This is not true--you can use these words while still writing in active voice:

John was throwing the ball. (This is not active voice, although "John threw the ball" would be a stronger way to write this sentence.)

John was a good student. (This is not passive voice.)

When is it acceptable to use passive voice?

Passive voice in and of itself is not completely an evil thing. I've mentioned why you shouldn't use it most of the time. However, there may be times in a story when it's unavoidable to maintain the integrity of your character and point of view, or when it's not possible or appropriate to say who's taking the action ("The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" -Mark Twain). More commonly, you may find it necessary to use passive voice in situations where you need to soften a message.

This is useful in business writing:

The reports were not completed on time.

This is a softer message than, "Bill did not complete the reports on time," especially when it's not appropriate to the audience to say who made the error. In a situation where you are speaking directly to the person who made the error, "You did not complete the reports on time" may be too direct. This is especially an issue when you are speaking to someone who is a peer, because you could be overstepping your boundaries and/or damaging a relationship by speaking so directly. However, by saying, "The reports were not completed on time, and as a result, our department didn't get the funding we needed." This tells Bill that his actions caused an issue that he should know about, without speaking accusingly. In all likelihood, Bill knows he's the one who didn't complete the reports on time.

It's also useful to use passive voice when you are reporting on actions you took, but you want to remove yourself from the report. This may be done in laboratory reports, where you want to keep the focus on the experiment rather than yourself.

The solution was brought to a boil.

As you can see, there is a time and a place for passive voice. However, use it judiciously and only where necessary.