Well, coming from my perspective as a government contractor working alongside scientists and engineers, I see passive voice used almost exclusivley in many documents. It may be my own personal bias to think this, but I think that it’s not just a habit, at least the way these folks use it – I think it’s a deliberate defense. In government, most of the time, one doesn’t want to be the actor, or otherwise call attention to whose fault something might be. These writers are intentionally hiding in the passive voice.
I’ve been asked by a supervisor to go back and amend something into the passive voice specifically to make it less clear. I’m paraphrasing from memory here: “Instead of saying, ‘we did x,’” he said, “why don’t you say, ‘x occurred;’ there’s no reason to emphasize who did it.” I swear I’ve seen people look pained when they hear the active voice.
Outside of government, I think people might still be using the passive voice – unconsciously, but deliberately, to obfuscate. If one is copying labwork, it feels safer to say “The Bunsen burner was turned on at 9:00,” than to say “I turned on the Bunsen burner” when the burner in question was actually turned on by your buddy Steve and “I” was sleeping in.
edit: Even when they’re not hiding anything, I think many people feel comfortable in the passive voice, the way a partridge is comfortable in dense ground cover.
While I don’t think I would grade on grammar and spelling (unless it was really bad) I would try my best to correct mistakes, so the student can learn, encourage them. But if they demonstrated the necessary knowledge I wouldn’t deduct points.
This reared its ugly head recently when I got a paper back from peer review with a reminder in red pen that I forgot to put my thesis statement at the end of the introductory paragraph. :rolleyes: Of course, it wasn’t freshman comp, so I knew it didn’t matter. Still, it made me shake my head.
Then I’m not entirely sure we agree. I can’t recall reading a lot of prose that made me think, “Man, that guy needs to use the passive voice less.”
Isn’t it possible that it was true then and it’s true now? It could be that the standards for undergraduate writing skills have been slipping this whole time, or maybe that they improved for a while and then declined again.
As for the old canard that the passive voice is used to dodge responsibility:
Where is the evasion of responsibility? Where is the anonymity of the writer? Sure, plenty of people do hide from responsibility and identification in the passive voice, as in Reagan’s “mistakes were made”, but the problem is not the use of the passive voice, it’s the omission of the actor. Railing against the passive voice based on this is like invading Iraq to go after bin Laden: You’re in the right ballpark, but you’re not playing the right game.
If someone were writing a research paper in real life, obviously grammar would be important, so yeah it should factor in the grade. But it’s not a big factor, so maybe 5% or whatever for writing skills in general, and maybe another 5% for general presentation.
No, it has nothing to do with objectivity; it’s about cohesive discourse and sentence focus. Take a description of some hypothetical medical research:
“Half of the participants in the study were given injections of X, while the other half were give placebo injections. The former demonstrated an improved…”
What good does it do to say:
“Assistant Jane Smith gave half of the participants injections of X, while assistant John Doe gave the other half a placebo. The former demonstrated an improved…”
We don’t care about the agent of the verb give, so it’s poor writing. The focus should be on the patient of the verb (participants in the study), and how they reacted to the medicine being tested–so put them in the subject position of the first sentence.
Also, in the second example, the place taker (“the former”) is muddied because it’s supposed to refer to the patient of the verb, but appears on face-value to refer to the agent of the verb, because English discourse normally follows place-taking topic repetition in subject position.
This would go for newspaper articles as well. What point is there to replace:
“A Mid-City man was robbed and beaten last night on the X block of Washington Ave.”
With:
“Someone robbed and beat a Mid-City man on the X block of Washington Ave.”
Yeah, of course it was “someone”: it wasn’t the Easter Bunny.
That was my point. Most freshmen of any class will have comparatively little exposure to academic written discourse. Usually high school English teachers have you read a bunch of literature (fiction, usually), and then say, “Write an essay on…” (“Essay? What’s an essay? I’ve never seen one.”) Or assignments are often things like, “How would you feel if you were character so-and-so in that situation?”
When the typical undergraduate gets to college, he/she is expected to expound on much more subtle points, more restricted by the instructor’s more precise prompt, which requires more complex language. So s/he has to grapple with more precise word choice, more complex sentence structures, and more abstract expression.
That would be hard to determine, because the data is so sketchy, but from what I’ve read, it’s always been this way with public school educated college students, and probably won’t change much for a while.
It’s not that the five-paragraph essay is bad form. It’s not. It’s a convenient way to organize thoughts into a cohesive and coherent format. My objection is that so many people are attached to it that students (and some professors) can’t get past it. I’ve had to explain to journalism students that it’s best to forget everything they learned in freshman comp and just focus on what they’ve learned in their journalism-writing courses, and that journalism writing would also work well for academic papers in their other courses. The students who chose to take that advice ended up doing well. The ones who didn’t, well, didn’t.
(I just now saw this, so forgive the double post.)
My own freshman comp instructor had a theory about this. He began his college teaching career just as standardized testing became big. He felt that high school English teachers were teaching students not to take a definite position about anything, lest a test grader take offense and mark the essay down, and thus encouraged passive voice. Active voice, on the other hand, forces the writer to take a position and defend it. He had a hell of a time getting students to un-learn what their high school teachers had taught.
OTOH, one of my other English professors in college graded standardized essay exams in graduate school and she said that if the grader does take offense with a particular essay, the grader has no business grading essays.
I find this surprising since most journalism isn’t essays. But even that which is, (e.g., Anna Quindlen in Newsweek) certainly isn’t in the “five-paragraph essay form.”
It’s easy to teach and easy to learn, which is probably why it will never die. But it certainly is pretty dull to read.
BTW: Anyone out there who has to take freshman comp, see if you can do it in the Rhetoric Department. Their TAs study writing itself, and how it works, and in my experience, they’re better able to explain to you how writing works, and see from your point of view. TAs in the English Dept. can tell effective writing, but they’re not usually trained in how to explain why it’s effective to a beginning academic writer.
How is that surprising? As I said, for some things, the five-paragraph essay is just fine. But it’s not appropriate for everything, and I’ve gotten more mileage from my journalism training than from my freshman comp course. In fact, most of my professors liked my writing style because my papers were short, sweet and to the point. The sole exception was my literature professor who felt that my papers were not always written in English-approved style, but I still got an A- for the course.
I misunderstood, apologies. It was the word “essay,” and I was thinking about regular, typical published journalism. On re-read, it makes sense.
This, however, doesn’t make sense. Passive voice has nothing to do with taking a position or not. You can say, “The Federal government should decriminalize marijuana,” of you can say. “Marijuana should be decriminalized.” They both take a stand.
Besides, what makes him think readers would grade them down? I used to read Subject A compositions for students coming into the University of California, and not only does the prompt ask you to take a position, we never cared what the position was so long as it was supported sufficiently and appropriately.
Just a pedantic nit, lost in the sea of the thread, but “x occurred” is not in the passive voice; it’s in the active voice. “x was done by us” would be passive, as would be “x was done”, which, yes, does not specify who did x. Incidentally, “We did.” would be active and not specify the “x” (or, better active voice examples like “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Saw what? Conquered what?), yet no one rails against the active voice just because it sometimes leaves some things unspecified, even though plenty of people complain about the passive voice for just that reason.
I think a lot of the problem is that people don’t really have a great grasp of the passive/active voice distinction in the first place (and the unfortunate misleading names certainly don’t help): they just apply some sort of semantic considerations in their attempts at grammatical analysis, instead of a proper syntactic analysis. “Oh, the undertaking of ‘x’ can’t be doing anything very active itself, it’s just an event. Only the instigators of the event can be the active ones, and they’re not even mentioned in the sentence, so this sentence can’t be active. It must be passive.” That sort of mistaken thinking.
As I said, it was a theory he had, it wasn’t based on any sort of hard evidence. It just seemed to him that a lot of people were using passive voice and blaming it on their high school English teacher who taught them to write that way. So the instructor took it one step further as he lectured the class on active voice. Notion, not fact.
I certainly agree that passive voice has a legitimate place in good writing. My argument is that it’s too often used as the default without any real thought about effective sentence structure or clarity. For example, I’d rewrite your illustration thus:
“Half of the participants received injections of X; the other half received a placebo.”
The sentence is active AND emphasizes the appropriate agent.
That was my first thought. If you aren’t going to grade on grammar (and spelling), you are going to open yourself up to the most horrid conventions of texting imaginable. And you SAID you weren’t going to grade on grammar - so anything goes. As an instructor, I’d be doing myself the favor of leaving myself as open as possible to ‘flexible’ grading - and that has nothing at all to do what the importance of teaching even Science majors how to write.
Your active voice rewrite is a perfectly natural, well-written, appropriate sentence. But in what way wasn’t the passive voice original also just as perfectly natural, well-written, and appropriate? That is to say, what substantive advantage is gained by the rewrite?
They can’t. Obviously, the purpose of the degree or the paper is to effectively communicate knowledge. If the means of communication is not much above the Tarzan of the Apes level, it’s not very effective.
