Why all the hate for the passive voice?

[Queen Bruin]

This seems more of an IMHO than a GQ thing, but mods move if appropriate.

I was proofing a law school assignment for The Highwayman this evening and he asked me to point out any passive sentences. Out in the Wide World, they're apparently looked down upon. I remember writing papers in Word, and everytime I ran the grammar/spellchecker, Bill* would get all pissed about my passives. What gives? What's wrong with using the passive voice? I use it all the time, even had papers that were half or more in the passive and I had no complaints (actually I had mostly straight As, believe it or not).


*As in Gates. Everytime Windows does something to or for me, like spellcheck, Blue Screen of Death or a ninja reboot, I just say "Bill". As in, "Bill's corporate grammar suggestions suck ass."

[Hunter Hawk]

Information that's presented in passive voice is harder to parse, so it takes more effort to figure out what's really going on. In general, we're trained to approach information in a subject-verb-object model, so when you use passive voice in an object-verb-subject structure (or even in just an object-verb structure), the reader has to mentally flip stuff around in order to fit it into an understandable format.

Also, passive voice tends to be wordier, and the extra words generally don't convey useful information themselves.

[Scissorjack]

It depends how you use it. It's appropriate if you don't know who performed an action {my house was robbed}, you don't care who performed the action {the house was built last year}, or it's obvious who performed the action {the man was arrested}. It's also used for a "Voice Of God" tone {Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted},.

That "Voice Of God" manner, though, can sound turgid and bombastic, with the extra verbiage revealing nothing but obscuring much {Mistakes were made!}: "It is believed that blah blah blah..." Believed by whom? When? Where?

Active voice makes you nail your colours to the mast, and helps keep you honest: "I believe that blah blah blah..." Oh yeah? Why? "Many people believe that blah blah blah..." Oh yeah? Name 'em. "He believes that blah blah blah..." Oh yeah? Cite!

[CynicalGabe]

Passive voice is not hated by everyone. It is, in fact, preferred by some.

[Hostile Dialect]

The passive voice is used quite often, in fact. I'm told that it's been made quite popular. Couldn't tell you by whom, though...

[Harriet the Spry]

Passive voice is often the hallmark of bureaucratic writing where no one wants to take responsibility.

Example -

Passive - Your request will be reviewed.
Active - Jane Smith, Dept. Manager, will review your request.

(Thought experiment - which sentence sounds most like it came for a letter from the government, and which from a business that cares about its customers?)

Passive voice can be a lazy way to write your sentences, where you define the verb but don't nail down the subject of the sentence.

It definitely gives a different spin to things when you put them in active voice. I've written a lot of passive voice in my day, generally for bureaucrats where no one wants to take responsibility.

All that said, some sentences just can't muster up the activity level to get active voice.

[RealityChuck]

The main problem with the passive voice is overuse. As fetus points out, there are times when it is perfect for what you want to convey. However, when overused, it makes the meaning harder to grasp.

It was used a lot in scientific writing ("The acid was added to the water"), but now even that is changing. The belief here was that by indicating you did something ("I added acid to the water"), you were losing objectivity.

But, "Your request will be reviewed" is a fine way of expressing the thought (businesses, even those that "care," use it, too) when the name of the reviewer is unknown or needs to remain hidden (to prevent harrassment during the reviewal process).

[Paul in Qatar]

Passive voice is often the hallmark of bureaucratic writing where no one wants to take responsibility.


Exactly. The Passive Voice can be legitimately used when:

1. The Actor is unknown:
My car was stolen.

2. The Actor is unimportant:
The letters were mailed.

3. The Actor is commonly known:
The tree was blown down.

Otherwise, try to avoid the Passive. It is hard to figure out (especially in the Perfect tenses) and strikes many people as being weaselly.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Other views:


http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=162294&highlight=passive

[AHunter3]

In addition to the political misuse to hide agency ("mistakes were made"), there are similar academic misuses. Lots of turgid theory out there has been written by annoying theorists who assert things as if they were "just so", without developing a line of thought that leads the reader to that point. And they use a form of the passive voice to do it.

Rather than "Look at the terms and expressions used in these two situations, <examples>, and not only that but the intonation and inflections are similar, so I began to see them as parallels", you have "The employer-employee relationship is a reification of the emotionally and psychologically-extant parent-child relationship". It just is.

And "cognitive dynamics of the primordial parental-infantile symbiotic state are recapitulated over and over again in these exchanges", rather than "Both the employer and the employee repeat the habits of thought, feeling, and behavior that they learned from the parent-child relationships". In the latter case, the recapitulation is something that people are doing, and under some circumstance (perhaps employers and employees reading this very theory article and realizing that it is true and that these behaviors are in many ways counterproductive), those people, being conscious agents, could do otherwise, unless it is caused by the work-place structure and not by old learned psychological patterns of interaction buried in their heads. But in the former case, well, hey, it simply is recapitulated, in much the same way that it is raining. You don't ask "Who is raining?", you just raise an umbrella and accept it as How Things Are.


Disclaimer: This isn't in any way a rant about psychology versus sociology. Og knows sociological theory is as rife with it as psych, if not more so! Just an example that came to my head.

[ultrafilter]

It was used a lot in scientific writing ("The acid was added to the water"), but now even that is changing. The belief here was that by indicating you did something ("I added acid to the water"), you were losing objectivity.

I don't know that it's so much about objectivity here. The important thing in an experiment write-up is the experiment and its results; no one cares who actually added the acid to the water. By using the passive voice, you can strip away those unnecessary details and get to what the reader cares about.

[scr4]

Rather than "Look at the terms and expressions used in these two situations, <examples>, and not only that but the intonation and inflections are similar, so I began to see them as parallels", you have "The employer-employee relationship is a reification of the emotionally and psychologically-extant parent-child relationship".
How is that second sentence a passive voice? I thought the passive voice version of this sentence would be something like "The parallells between.... are shown by...".

[Giles]

It was used a lot in scientific writing ("The acid was added to the water"), but now even that is changing. The belief here was that by indicating you did something ("I added acid to the water"), you were losing objectivity.
Well, if the scientific report has just one author, and that author added the acid, then "I added acid" would be just fine. But what if an unnamed lab assistant added the acid; or what if the paper has 14 authors, and it was the 11th, 12th and 13th authors who added the acid on different days? Isn't this a case where who added the acid is likely to be irrelevant, and therefore the passive voice is useful?

[AHunter3]

Originally Posted by AHunter3
Rather than "Look at the terms and expressions used in these two situations, <examples>, and not only that but the intonation and inflections are similar, so I began to see them as parallels", you have "The employer-employee relationship is a reification of the emotionally and psychologically-extant parent-child relationship".

How is that second sentence a passive voice? I thought the passive voice version of this sentence would be something like "The parallells between.... are shown by...".

It's not really "passive voice" in the conventional English-grammar sense (although the second example I gave is). But it works in a similar way, conceptually if not grammatically: from the quote you excised above (requoted by me here), in the second formulation, you have the (unspoken/unwritten/implicit) "is seen as", rendered simply as "is", whereas in the first formulation there is an explicit "I, the theorist/author, see it as".

[MsRobyn]

The passive voice is also appropriate in cases where an inanimate object can only be acted upon. For example, "The corpse was moved to the morgue." Since corpses generally don't move by themselves (or they wouldn't be corpses), the passive voice is appropriate.

Robin

[twickster]

The passive voice is also appropriate in cases where an inanimate object can only be acted upon. For example, "The corpse was moved to the morgue." Since corpses generally don't move by themselves (or they wouldn't be corpses), the passive voice is appropriate.

Robin

Often, but not necessarily always -- for instance, if it were a story about the morgue crew, you'd say "Fred and Barney moved the corpse..."

[MsRobyn]

Often, but not necessarily always -- for instance, if it were a story about the morgue crew, you'd say "Fred and Barney moved the corpse..."

Yes, but only if Fred and Barney moved the corpse. :D

Seriously, if the actor isn't known (or is irrelevant) and it involves an inanimate object, passive is OK. I guess I'm just repeating Paul in Saudi here.

Sentences have not been written passively by me in a very long time.

Robin

[ultrafilter]

The trick with the passive voice is to match up the grammatical and syntactical subjects of the sentence. If the sentence is about the corpse, "The corpse was moved." is better than "Fred and Barney moved the corpse." If the sentence is about Fred and Barney, the latter is better than the former.

[twickster]

The trick with the passive voice is to match up the grammatical and syntactical subjects of the sentence. If the sentence is about the corpse, "The corpse was moved." is better than "Fred and Barney moved the corpse." If the sentence is about Fred and Barney, the latter is better than the former.


...which is why I said (um, it was said by me?) "...if it were a story about the morgue crew."

I think we're all totally agreeing about the same point. (Agreement has been reached?)

[Sailboat]

I think the reason for the "hate" specifically, that is, the strong reactions to it, is not that it can be used to obfuscate responsibility and disguise the actor, but that it is so often deliberately used specifically to obfuscate/disguise/deceive. That's why people dislike it so strongly.

"Mistakes were made." is infamous for a reason. :rolleyes:

Hijacking the thread a teensy bit: although what follows is not an example of the passive voice, I see a similar effect when some people use "they/them" to refer to a single specific person, but want to conceal that person's gender. The classic use is when one's significant other is relating a story about an adventure or good time for which one was not present. "I went to the restaurant with a friend to they paid." Very few people have plural or collective friends, unless said people are acquainted with slime molds, which I am not ruling out. The reason for "they/them" to be inserted *in this specific case* is because "and HE paid" sets off jealous alarm bells. In certain relationships, usually the young (juvenile?) ones, it's almost a given that any overt failure to specify the gender of a third party being talked about is quite intentional. It's kind of amusing.

Sailboat

[Sailboat]

"I went to the restaurant with a friend to they paid."

"I went to the restaurant with a friend AND they paid." That's what I get for changing my example on the fly.

Sailboat

[Scissorjack]

Hijacking the thread a teensy bit: although what follows is not an example of the passive voice, I see a similar effect when some people use "they/them" to refer to a single specific person, but want to conceal that person's gender.

Not even deliberate concealment: in the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English {apart from clumsy circumlocutions like "he or she", or written-only formulas like s/he} "they" seems to be de facto evolving into a gender-neutral pronoun. "If anyone finds my wallet, could they return it to blah blah blah" sounds and reads a lot better than "...could he or she return it to..." No doubt someone's done a study on it, but we seem to be in the process of a linguistic change here.

[Excalibre]

Rather than "Look at the terms and expressions used in these two situations, <examples>, and not only that but the intonation and inflections are similar, so I began to see them as parallels", you have "The employer-employee relationship is a reification of the emotionally and psychologically-extant parent-child relationship". It just is.
Except that (and this is something I've noticed in a lot of complaints about the passive voice) your example isn't actually in the passive voice.

I think there's several reasons. It's common in scientific or academic writings, which gives it a bit of a high-falutin tone and thus (given our modern stylistic preference for very clear writing) tends to make the writing seem mushy, even if it's not inherently any harder to understand (which it really isn't; the passive voice is commonly used in speech. It's not hard to parse for any literate native speaker of English.) And it definitely is used in weasely ways - "It is commonly understood that . . . " and suchlike are methods to avoid actually justifying your viewpoint. Further, it changes the aspect of the verb so that the exact point in time that the action occurred is not indicated, which tends to sap a bit of the vitality from sentences written in the passive.

It's a good idea not to overuse the passive voice, but it's silly to eliminate it entirely from speech. It's worse to draw conclusions about the intent of writers who use it, as in this case discussed in Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000236.html) in which conclusions about Reuters' supposed bias were drawn from examples of passive voice usage - examples in which, as it turns out, the passive voice was not used. It seems that many people mistake the phrase "passive voice" for sentences that merely don't state the agent of a verb, even if they're not actually passives.



It's not really "passive voice" in the conventional English-grammar sense (although the second example I gave is). But it works in a similar way, conceptually if not grammatically: from the quote you excised above (requoted by me here), in the second formulation, you have the (unspoken/unwritten/implicit) "is seen as", rendered simply as "is", whereas in the first formulation there is an explicit "I, the theorist/author, see it as".
And my point has already been made - one of your examples wasn't a passive. It wasn't a passive at all - it's not valid to make up another meaning for the term; the "conventional . . . grammar sense" is the only sense of the term "passive voice".



Hijacking the thread a teensy bit: although what follows is not an example of the passive voice, I see a similar effect when some people use "they/them" to refer to a single specific person, but want to conceal that person's gender. The classic use is when one's significant other is relating a story about an adventure or good time for which one was not present. "I went to the restaurant with a friend to they paid." Very few people have plural or collective friends, unless said people are acquainted with slime molds, which I am not ruling out. The reason for "they/them" to be inserted *in this specific case* is because "and HE paid" sets off jealous alarm bells. In certain relationships, usually the young (juvenile?) ones, it's almost a given that any overt failure to specify the gender of a third party being talked about is quite intentional. It's kind of amusing.
"They" doesn't only refer to plurals; it's been in use for hundreds of years to indicate that gender is unclear or irrelevant, as with "Each one took their turn." The use of "they" to avoid having to choose between "he" and "she" is universal and definitely a part of English grammar. The use of it to describe a friend, whose gender is presumably not unclear, is a bit unusual. But the use of "they" as a gender-neutral singular is not unusual in the least.


"they" seems to be de facto evolving into a gender-neutral pronoun.
A common misconception (sometimes called the "illusion of recentness" among linguists.) Actually, "they" is not evolving in that direction. It's had that sense for a very long time; it evolved to take that role long before either of us was born.

[AHunter3]

So modify the thrust of my original post from "Yeah, I hate that <followed by examples>" to "Yeah, I hate that and some writing sins of a similar ilk <followed by examle>".

[Scissorjack]

A common misconception (sometimes called the "illusion of recentness" among linguists.) Actually, "they" is not evolving in that direction. It's had that sense for a very long time; it evolved to take that role long before either of us was born.

Speaking as a former ESL teacher, I'll just note that it's taken textbooks an awfully long time to catch up - nary a mention in any text that I've taught from, yet an everyday usage which would confuse the hell out of students: why do you say "My house was burgled - they took everything."? Were there several burglars? Why do you say "they" for one person?

That opens the whole can of worms labeled "Prescriptive vs. Descriptive": to what extent do you teach English as it's spoken as opposed to English as it "ought" to be? A subject for another hijack, I guess, but I'll take a shot and say that I'm a prescriptivist with reservations: yeah, these are the rules, go learn 'em. OK, now you've learnt 'em you should know that they're not chiselled in stone and are broken all the time. Here's how to break 'em properly...

[Excalibre]

Speaking as a former ESL teacher, I'll just note that it's taken textbooks an awfully long time to catch up - nary a mention in any text that I've taught from, yet an everyday usage which would confuse the hell out of students: why do you say "My house was burgled - they took everything."? Were there several burglars? Why do you say "they" for one person?

That opens the whole can of worms labeled "Prescriptive vs. Descriptive": to what extent do you teach English as it's spoken as opposed to English as it "ought" to be? A subject for another hijack, I guess, but I'll take a shot and say that I'm a prescriptivist with reservations: yeah, these are the rules, go learn 'em. OK, now you've learnt 'em you should know that they're not chiselled in stone and are broken all the time. Here's how to break 'em properly...
I don't really understand the occasional prescriptivist who still gets upset by this perfectly normal usage. It's not like "'They' shall only be used as a plural" is written in stone somewhere; deciding that only one use of a word is legitimate makes no sense, especially once you study the range of languages and how they work at transmitting information.

I'm not surprised that ESL textbooks don't cover this, but I think it's a bad thing, since it's a usage that anyone in the English speaking world is going to hear, and frequently. Students should at least be prepared to understand it, even if they decide to speak in a strictly prescriptionist-approved way.

[Lionne]

This thread taught me more about passive voice than my entire 12th grade English year. Thanks!

[Queen Bruin]

Wow, thanks for all the informative replies, everyone. I appreciate it.

[Scissorjack]

Often, but not necessarily always -- for instance, if it were a story about the morgue crew, you'd say "Fred and Barney moved the corpse..."

It depends. You could legitimately use passive voice as a stylistic device to deliberately shift the emphasis to the end of the sentence, for example in order to build suspense:

He cleared his throat, and the drawing room fell silent. "Ladies and gentlemen", he drawled languidly, "I regret to inform you that the murder was committed by...one of our number!"

[Excalibre]

It depends. You could legitimately use passive voice as a stylistic device to deliberately shift the emphasis to the end of the sentence, for example in order to build suspense:

He cleared his throat, and the drawing room fell silent. "Ladies and gentlemen", he drawled languidly, "I regret to inform you that the murder was committed by...one of our number!"
Excellent example! There's plenty of good reasons to use the passive voice; it can be overused, but the grammar checkers that highlight every single example are very poorly-designed.

[Excalibre]

It depends. You could legitimately use passive voice as a stylistic device to deliberately shift the emphasis to the end of the sentence, for example in order to build suspense:

He cleared his throat, and the drawing room fell silent. "Ladies and gentlemen", he drawled languidly, "I regret to inform you that the murder was committed by...one of our number!"
Excellent example! There's plenty of good reasons to use the passive voice; it can be overused, but the grammar checkers that highlight every single example are very poorly-designed.

[uglybeech]

I was always taught (and I agree) that the biggest problem with the passive voice is purely stylistic. It's (yawn) boring. It sounds passive. And usually unnecessarily so. Converting sentences from the passive to the active punches them up and makes the reader think about the action and the actors performing them.

compare:

"Jack was punched by Joe" to "Joe punched Jack"
"i was thrilled by the news" to "the news thrilled me"

It's not quite as obvious in a single sentence, but an entire paragraph in the passive will put you to sleep compared to an entire paragraph in the active.

The "passive exonerative" is another problem, of course. But IMHO it's totally legitimate as a rhetorical strategy in a variety of situations. It's not inherently "wrong."

[Hostile Dialect]

I'm not surprised that ESL textbooks don't cover this, but I think it's a bad thing

I'm not, because I've been taking Spanish (as a second language) classes for a while, and when I started dating my current girlfriend and hanging out with her friends and family--native speakers all--I found out that classroom Spanish is quite a bit different from Jamacha Road Spanish. There are a few exceptions within the class, of course--Spanish classes here are highly geared towards the language as used in Latin America, so 'vosotros' is entirely absent, ll sounds the same as y and s sounds the same as z, etc. Also, my textbook lists a few colloquial alternatives sometimes when the "correct" word isn't used much. But it's definitely prescriptivist.

And honestly? I'm glad it is, for a few reasons:

Speaking a language "by the book" will get you understood by just about every native speaker, everywhere, even if you might sound a little archaic. Plus, there's no way that all the dialects, even in a three-country radius, of a language as prominent as English or Spanish can be taught effectively to anyone other than people who major in the stuff. I, BTW, have never heard (with my ears) the word "burgled" in my life.
The classroom is a stiff, rigid environment made for teaching stiff, rigid things. Is it necessary to spice things up a little to keep students' attention? Yes, I think so. But the textbook-lecturer-homework triangle is nowhere near as effective for that as just jumping in and listening to native speakers talk.
It's fun to learn how to talk like a native speaker, or at least I have fun doing it. Having that taken away by learning it on notecards that I have to turn in to The Man every three weeks in a neat pile would ruin it, IMO. It's kind of silly, but it gives me a neat little kick to pronounce "yo" as "zho" in class like my girlfriend would, and watch everyone but the teacher look at me like an alien. It's a lot more rewarding to use those words and pronunciations in conversation after learning them naturally, too.
When the textbook tries to offer up little morsels of slang, it generally fails and the teacher ends up saying "ignore that little sidebar there, nobody uses those words". If there's a colloquial word we really need to learn in class, the teacher will tell us during the lesson, or someone will raise their hand and ask.

Anyway, language is a naturally flowing and changing thing, and I think its natural evolution is beautiful when observed in its natural environment. Taking it into the classroom makes it lose some of its meaning for me. For me, it's like the difference between sharing a doobie with Keith Richards while he rocks out on his guitar, and taking a Rock History class where you read a chapter on the Stones.

[MsRobyn]

What fetus said, and its converse:

My former Spanish prof is from Uruguay. She speaks fluent English, but her Spanish is South American, not Mexican or Spanish. She's had students tell her she's wrong in some of her Spanish usage because she doesn't speak like the book.

There is a similar phenomenon in English classrooms when the perfect grammar in the textbook doesn't match the colloquial/informal grammar used in everyday life.

Robin

[Hostile Dialect]

My former Spanish prof is from Uruguay. She speaks fluent English, but her Spanish is South American, not Mexican or Spanish. She's had students tell her she's wrong in some of her Spanish usage because she doesn't speak like the book.

Yeah, but they do talk weird down there! ;)

Anyway, what happens when a Southerner moves to San Francisco and tries to teach Northern California English in a thick Alabama drawl? I see a recipe for disaster, and I also see automatic teacher pigeon-holing.