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.”
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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…”.
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?
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”.
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.
Yes, but only if Fred and Barney moved the corpse.
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.
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.
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.
