If you’ve been paying attention to grammar lessons and/or the little red comments that teachers write on your papers (please pay attention to these things and don’t let your teachers’ hard work go to waste!), then you’ve probably heard of the passive voice. And that it’s bad and we shouldn’t use it.
But what exactly is the passive voice?
In terms you might use amongst adults in an academic setting:
The passive voice is a writing construction in which the subject of your sentence is not doing the action.
For example, in the sentence “Mistakes were made by zombies,” the subject of the sentence is “mistakes,” but it is actually the zombies who are doing the action of making the mistakes.
In the active voice, the zombies, who are doing the action, would be the subject of the sentence: Zombies made mistakes.
Okay, but how do I recognize the passive voice? Grammar is hard!
Here’s the rule, okay: if you put “by zombies” at the end of a sentence and it makes sense, then it’s in the passive voice.
It’s that easy! Try a few:
Mistakes were made (by zombies).
Blog posts were written (by zombies).
Brains were eaten (by zombies).
See? If you can add ‘by zombies’ to the end of your sentence, then it’s in the passive voice.
If it’s that easy, why have I heard a bunch of complicated and confusing ways to recognize the passive voice?
Likely because whoever explained passive voice to you didn’t know about the zombies trick. (Full disclosure: I didn’t make up the zombies trick. I learned it from my eighth grade Latin teacher!)
There are some methods for recognizing passive voice that are confusing, and some that are simply incorrect. Let’s talk about one incorrect passive-voice-finding method you might have heard (One of my high school English teachers taught it this way, so I know this is out there even though it’s incorrect!):
Passive Voice Finding LIE: You can recognize the passive voice by looking for the verb ‘to be’.
For example, “Zombies were eating brains.” Let’s be totally clear: “Zombies were eating brains (by zombies)” makes no sense, so it’s not passive voice.
In this case, the subject of the sentence (zombies) is doing the action (eating the brains), so the sentence is in the active voice. The verb ‘to be’ (were) is a helping verb working with the present participle (eating) to create the past progressive verb tense (were eating). That is a totally valid and allowed grammar thing which is not passive voice!
Okay, I see how to recognize passive voice, but why does this even matter?
There are two main reasons why it’s important to avoid the passive voice:
- Using the passive voice makes our sentences unnecessarily wordy and all around more difficult to read.
- Using the passive voice can allow us to avoid taking or allocating responsibility, which makes it difficult to fix or improve anything.
In the sentence “Mistakes were made by zombies,” it would be simpler, nicer, and more concise to instead use the active voice to say “Zombies made mistakes.”
But let’s look for a moment at a much more sinister sentence: “Mistakes were made.”
(You already know, at this point, that you can add “by zombies” to the end of this sentence and it will make sense, so you know that it’s in the passive voice.)
This altogether omission of the do-er of the action from the sentence is the dangerous and sinister part of the passive voice: it is possible (through use of the passive voice) to talk about events without ever talking about the responsible parties.
Mistakes were made… by whom? By zombies? By rats? By aliens? By the politician who wrote this sentence into a speech trying to cover up their latest scandal and get the public to buy their apology? We may never know.
Just kidding! Usually we do know, and it is our responsibility as writers to use our words to be specific and to give the reader the appropriate information to properly understand the story that we are telling.
The Moral Imperative of Avoiding The Passive Voice
Take a minute to look at these decidedly sinister uses of the passive voice, and how much less comfortable (but more honest) it is to use the active voice:
| She was raped. (by zombies) | Her high school boyfriend raped her. |
| Millions of Africans were enslaved and brought to the Americas. (by zombies) | Europeans and Americans enslaved millions of African people. |
| Ninety percent of the Indigenous population in the Americas was killed. (by zombies) | Christopher Columbus and the American colonizers killed ninety percent of the Indigenous population. |
| He was abused as a child. (by zombies) | His aunt abused him when he was a child. |
| Mistakes were made. (by zombies) | I made some mistakes. |
| Our environment is being destroyed. (by zombies) | Corporations under capitalism are destroying our environment. |
That is the power of the passive voice.
Speaking and writing in the passive voice (the left hand side of the chart) allows us to ignore and to forget about who did the deed. Speaking and writing in the active voice (the right hand side of the chart) forces us to remember in each sentence who did the deed — who is responsible for the things that are happening in our world.
Forcing ourselves and others to know and remember that information is powerful — how are we to demand that people do better if we have not asserted that it is people who do wrong in the first place?
We often talk about avoiding the passive voice as if it is a stylistic concern — something that will make our writing flow more naturally and attract less criticism from grammar nerds. And avoiding the passive voice is a stylistic concern.
But more importantly, it is a moral imperative. It is a moral imperative that when we write, we are clear about who is responsible for the events of the stories that we are telling. And when we do not know who is responsible for the events of the stories that we are telling, we have a moral imperative to find out and then to include that information in our writing — or else to be very clear that we do not know.
It is easier, often, to fall into writing in the passive voice; there is less conflict, less need to know exactly what we are talking about, and less work altogether. But we are not writing to make things easier for ourselves.
We are writing because we have stories that we have to tell — and we owe it to those stories to tell them correctly.
Okay, but what if there is no good way to change my sentence into the active voice?
First, make sure that you’re not using the passive voice to avoid talking about the party responsible for the event. If you’ve made absolutely sure of that, it might be the case that this sentence is an exception.
As George Orwell said in his six rules of writing:
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
George Orwell, “Politics and The English Language”
Which is to say, as much as I have a personal vendetta against the passive voice, you should go ahead and use it in the rare case that it adds clarity to your writing.
Go forth and write!