From the Editor’s Desk: Why to Avoid Passive Sentences

One of the very first pieces of formal writing advice I ever received in college was to avoid use of the infinitive verb “to be” in all its conjugations: is, am, are, were, was, etc. I didn’t quite understand why Professor Lynn banished “to be” from his assignments, so I carried out the orders dutifully. So accustomed was I to “is,” “was,” and “am” in my speech that I struggled to find ways to fix the offending passages. Only later did I come to understand. The problem, I would learn in graduate school, and then pass on to my own students, was with sentence construction that we call “passive.”

​“Passive voice” or “passive verb construction” describes a sentence where the action of that sentence is distributed between a form of the verb “to be” and the nominal action of the sentence. “The ball was kicked” is an example of a passive sentence. There is kicking, but we know little about that kicking. The primary verb of the sentence, “was,” carries little meaning other than to indicate a state of being. The kicking resides in a state of being rather than existing as a discrete action with form and substance that a reader might envision.
 
Chief among the information that we don’t have in this passive sentence is who did the kicking. Besides the “to be” verb, the hallmark of the passive voice is that the subject, i.e., the thing that is doing the action in the sentence, is often hidden from view. The chief sin of the passive sentence is that it occludes from your reader’s notice the actor of the sentence. At best, it reveals the information later; at worst it is hidden entirely.
 
For some writers, this occlusion is the reason for their use of the passive voice. It hides the actor, the doer of the action. Thus writers and speakers who want to keep responsibility for an action from your notice will often revert to passive voice. How many times have you heard a politician say a version of “Mistakes were made”?
 
There are other infelicities associated with the passive voice. Because the passive voice hides the actor, more words are required to reveal that information. Passive sentences are thus wordier than their active counterparts.  One can write in passive voice “The ball was kicked by Candace” or choose the active version: “Candace kicked the ball.” Worse still would be “The ball was kicked. Candace was the one who had done the kicking.” Once we start with a passive sentence, our efforts to untangle the identity of the actor in that sentence, or subsequent sentences, usually require ever more words than simply describing the action actively at the outset. Over the course of a long piece of writing, such superfluity fatigues your reader.
 
“The brigade was moving across the hill” is passive. “The brigade advanced across the hill” is better. The active voice almost always guarantees the same or more information in fewer words. In most instances, superior writing takes the form of economic writing.
 
There are times to use passive sentences, such as here when simple declaration is wanted. In dialog, certainly, people often speak in passive voice. There are undoubtedly moments when an author prefers a state of being rather than an attributable action and times when the identity of the actor is irrelevant. Or perhaps an author wants to hide certain pieces of information, to disclose later. Notice the first sentence of this blog post: Did you catch that it was in passive voice? Did you find my revelation of the actor in the second sentence—Prof. John Lynn—dramatically compelling? Or did it simply try your patience? But in general, for most forms of expository writing, those instances occur far less frequently than passages that call for clear, unambiguous descriptions of action and the assignation of who or what is doing that action.
 
How to fix the passive voice? Focus on the verb—the verb, the verb, the verb! Choose your verbs carefully and wisely. I’ll offer more on verbs, and the importance of the verb to the sentence, in a subsequent post.

--David J. Snyder