Even if you think you have the grammar under control, you may not realize how easy it is to inadvertently venture into a lexical area that would upset your first year English teacher. Certainly, in my college days, I had a few teaching assistants who dealt with the passive voice.
Bright red markings underlined heaps of my prose, with an uppercase warning indicating that if I only used the active voice when writing papers, my reasoning would become clearer. At this point, I hadn’t figured out what the passive voice was. Unfortunately, I had to learn that the passive voice is loathed by some selected grammar snobs. (Neither of them likely enjoyed the previous two paragraphs.)
Here’s what you need to know about passive voice and active voice so you can avoid the kind of typographical errors I made in college but definitely never will.
First: active voice
To understand the passive voice, we must first dive into the most commonly used active voice. Basically the active voice Is used when the subject of a sentence performs the actions indicated by a verb.
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As the Harvard historian Mariel Wolfson points out American Journal Experts, “[a]At the most basic level, the active voice emphasizes the person or agent performing an action, briefly the actor. ‘“
Basically, the active voice is a much more commonly used grammatical structure in which the subject of a sentence is clearly defined.
If you want an example of the active voice, consider the following:
“The boy really loved soccer.”
Yes, it’s that simple. The active voice doesn’t leave much room for confusion. As Purdue University’s online writing lab explained::
Using an active voice for most of your sentences will make your meaning clear to readers and prevent the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy.
Purdue’s definition goes into what most writing teachers are trying to convey when teaching you to write. Using the active voice is straightforward and easy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the passive voice must be avoided at all costs.
What is the passive voice?
The passive voice turns the active sentence structure upside down. It’s an upside-down way of describing things, as the University of North Carolina’s Writing Center at Chapel Hill explains:
A passive construction is when you make the object of an action the object of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is taking the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence.
In other words, the verb obscures what the subject of the sentence is doing. An example of a sentence in the passive voice:
“The ball was kicked by the boy.”
If you were to write this in an active voice, you would simply go with “The boy kicked the ball,” a sentence that clearly describes that the subject of the sentence – the boy – kicked the ball.
Typically, passive speech construction requires the use of more words than the active voice. As a result, your point of view is more likely to be covered up – and your readers confused –with the passive voice.
Is the use of passive language ever appropriate?
It is not always crucial (or comfortable for the reader) to emphasize the main character of a sentence. As Wolfson explains, “there are many examples where we either can’t or don’t want to highlight the actor, especially when it comes to some mysterious element.”
She uses the passive language example to express mysterious developments in which the main actors are often unknown:
- My car was stolen on Sunday evening.
There are some academic contexts where the passive voice is even preferred – for example, academic writing. Often times, when researchers share the results of observations and scientific studies, they want to take responsibility from the researcher and apply it more accurately to the scientific method used.
How George Washington University explains::
Passive voice is useful for pulling the emphasis of the sentence away from the explorer. This applies in particular to the “Method” section in scientific journals. When using passive voice, make sure the performer is obvious or unimportant.
In general, excessive use of passive language can obscure the point you are trying to address. So be wise in how you use it so that you don’t endure it of being stared at an judgmental grammar purist.
