Passive voice use and misuse
First of all, what is the passive voice, and what is the active voice?
Consider the following six sentences. The first three are in the ACTIVE voice, the second three in the PASSIVE voice.
Active
i.
John eats the cake.
ii.
I have done all my homework.
iii.
The author is clearly arguing in favour of harsher punishments.
Passive
i.
The cake is eaten by John
ii.
All my homework has been done by me
iii.
Harsher punishments are clearly being
argued in favour of by the author.
The passive takes what was the
subject (John, I and the author in the examples above) and turns them into the “agent”, which is
always preceded by the proposition “by”. What was the object ("cake", "homework", "punishments") becomes the subject. In
other words, you are avoiding putting the subject where it belongs: in first position
at the start of your sentence.
Sometimes, the passive is used
precisely for this purpose: i.e. precisely to avoid naming the subject. All you need to do is leave out the agent (the word
after “by”). Compare these:
Active: I made a mistake (my
bad, sorry)
Passive with agent: A mistake was
made by me (my bad, sorry)
Passive without agent: A mistake
was made (what are you looking at me for?)
Also note that in the sentence above I used the passive ("Sometimes, the passive is used....). I do not wish to impose a ban, merely to restrict its use. Why is my passive above ok? Well, it is usually the voice that you want when giving instructions or describing a process in which the person in charge of the process is unimportant.
It is fair to say that English, a
subject-verb-object (SVO) language dislikes the passive. It weakens your writing, complicates the syntax and occasionally sounds even dishonest or lazy
(if you tell me, “Lessons were learned about the passive”, I will be a
lot less convinced than if you tell me, “I learned a lot about the passive.”)
Remember, the thing is to get to the
point, and starting with the subject is the fastest way there.
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