passive voice: approved of or shunned by you?

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I've always felt the passive voice gets too much of a bad rap from its critics. Obviously the thread title is an example to avoid, but there are many cases where I find the passive voice either no worse than or even less awkward than the active voice.

For example I could really go either way about "Much of New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina" vs. "Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans." And if the contest was more about New Orleans than about the Hurricane I'd go with the first example.

Also it would sound ridiculous to write "The other students often distract Timothy" on a report card instead of "Timothy is often distracted by other students.

Maybe I'm strawmanning here?

― Hurting 2, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:03 (eighteen years ago)

"Mistakes were made"

― daria-g, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:04 (eighteen years ago)

er "contest was about" - not sure what I meant by that

― Hurting 2, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:05 (eighteen years ago)

"context" was meant by you

― mookieproof, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:06 (eighteen years ago)

The money is topped by Mookie

― Hurting 2, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:09 (eighteen years ago)

I agree (w/ the original post) but I don't know who would actually advocate the use of the active voice in these cases.

― Sundar, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:09 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, I know. It's more just that "Avoid the passive voice" is one of those drilled grammar rules as though it were an absolute, when it's far from that, sort of like not ending with a preposition ("the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put").

― Hurting 2, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:11 (eighteen years ago)

it might be a style rule in certain circs, but "grammar rule"? no wai.

― grimly fiendish, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:17 (eighteen years ago)

The passive voice is liked by me. Hassle is often given to me by MS Word because it is used by me so much.

― The Real Dirty Vicar, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:18 (eighteen years ago)

my cock can be sucked by MS word repeatedly.

― grimly fiendish, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:26 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, it's not at all a grammar issue, more just a rhetorical one. And most of the cases where people really hammer on it are the sort of comp-class essay-writing situations where passive voice probably really is weakening your writing.

The more important part is that people get annoyed by the use of passive voice to camouflage cause/effect and evade responsibility, in that "mistakes were made" kind of way. I think the source is the way people use passive constructions (legitimately) in a lot of "official" language -- like say in the social sciences, where it might honestly be more precise to state the effect without claiming an absolute cause. And this slips out into people in other "official" categories using the same techniques to avoid making strong statements, borrowing this air of scientific uncertainty in order to downplay unpleasant things, make them seem inevitable, and stay vague about assigning blame.

― nabisco, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:30 (eighteen years ago)

And of course that leads to everyday people using passive constructions just because they sound like the "official" or businesslike writing, even in cases where they'd be better served (rhetorically speaking), by making clear assertions instead of hedging everything.

― nabisco, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:31 (eighteen years ago)

By this time tomorrow, passive voice will not have been used by me.

― Abbott, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:35 (eighteen years ago)

And most of the cases where people really hammer on it are the sort of comp-class essay-writing situations where passive voice probably really is weakening your writing.

And of course that leads to everyday people using passive constructions just because they sound like the "official" or businesslike writing, even in cases where they'd be better served (rhetorically speaking), by making clear assertions instead of hedging everything.

Nabisco OTM on both points. It's a daily struggle: I have to wean my comp students AND the journalism students at the newspaper I advise off it because they assume it's the Voice of Bureaucracy.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:35 (eighteen years ago)

I like the passive voice a lot, but my favorite is the middle voice. I wish English had one.

― max, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:38 (eighteen years ago)

By this time tomorrow, passive voice will not have been used by me.

-- Abbott, Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:35 PM (3 minutes ago)

Whoa, paradox!

― Hurting 2, Sunday, 15 April 2007 22:39 (eighteen years ago)

I had the sentence "Then Stewart’s cr0issant-baking, h0me-decorating ass w4s arrested," and my teacher told me to get rid of the passive voice. I changed it to "Then the feds sent Stewart's, etc. to jail," but I think I like the first one better.

― Tape Store, Sunday, 15 April 2007 23:10 (eighteen years ago)

In college I had a pedant for a Victorian lit class who would circle every example of passive voice in your essay, ignoring the content.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 15 April 2007 23:17 (eighteen years ago)

*for a Victorian lit professor

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 15 April 2007 23:18 (eighteen years ago)

I have a feeling that I use it a lot less than I think I do, but I'll still stick up for it against absurd context-ignoring blanket condemnation.

― bernard snowy, Monday, 16 April 2007 02:11 (eighteen years ago)

passive voice is funnnier.

― Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Monday, 16 April 2007 02:12 (eighteen years ago)

with three "n's"

― Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Monday, 16 April 2007 02:12 (eighteen years ago)

The way I have always been taught is to use active voice unless the doer of the action isn't important or you are trying to soften the impact of what you want to say. It seems like a good rule to me.

Also the public sector is worked in by me, the examples of passive voice being used by people here for no reason is insane and it makes it very hard for the passage to be read.

― webber, Monday, 16 April 2007 03:24 (eighteen years ago)

Hard and HILARIOUS!

(the title of my future memoir)

― Abbott, Monday, 16 April 2007 03:28 (eighteen years ago)

― Hurting 2, Monday, 16 April 2007 03:36 (eighteen years ago)

I'm a Dutch translator. They love the passive voice and often have no active subject in a sentence. Sometimes there is no choice to be had by me than for things to be done by unknown agents in the documents translated by me.

― Maria :D, Monday, 16 April 2007 04:11 (eighteen years ago)

Passive voice is great in Latin too, our language is so limited by senseless grammatical dogma!

― Maria, Monday, 16 April 2007 04:57 (eighteen years ago)

I'm a great fan of the passive voice, I was taught that technical writing should be in the passive voice wherever possible and it invades my everyday writing from that.

― Ed, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:30 (eighteen years ago)

I'm a Dutch translator. They love the passive voice and often have no active subject in a sentence.

We do? No idea was had by me about this.

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:37 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, I haven't come across this so much. Maybe in some texts, but not so much in the spoken language.

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:45 (eighteen years ago)

Nabisco says it well. The effect of the passive voice is to exempt the speaker from the events being described and place the events further and more fixedly in the past. Thus for "active" participants in those events, it's an evasive tactic: "We as players in the drama were powerless," it implies. However, for "passive" observers, it's a useful rhetorical device which helps to weave a grim oh-so-19th-century determinist chronology into a narrative: it tilts one toward compartmentalizing events, ordering them, and it emphasizes causality in doing so. The players in the drama were powerless, it implies. It's particularly useful in the fields of history, science, and tragedy in which writers seek to establish distance from the phenomena they describe.

― fife, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:47 (eighteen years ago)

(xpost)
Maybe in some texts, but not so much in the spoken language.

Did you do that on purpose? There's no active subject in that sentence! :-)

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:48 (eighteen years ago)

Yes. :-)

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:50 (eighteen years ago)

Passive voice is merely one of the multiple problematizing factors by which writing of the bureaucratic type and nature is excessively complicated and/or made less feasible to be comprehended by the public at large

It's on the way out I think. In the future, humans will communicate strictly in grunts and arm-waving pantomime.

― fife, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:53 (eighteen years ago)

http://i13.tinypic.com/2evff51.gif

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 06:56 (eighteen years ago)

xxxpost; I guess constructions like: "Er was nog geen besluit genomen..; Tegenwoordig wordt algemeen aangenomen..Er wordt gebeld..."etc. I study French, and my teachers keep telling us that that's a weird Dutch thing.

― Gaia1981, Monday, 16 April 2007 07:06 (eighteen years ago)

But maybe it's less common in Flemish, I don't know.

― Gaia1981, Monday, 16 April 2007 07:08 (eighteen years ago)

No, I just checked a couple of newspaper sites and it's totally true! I just hadn't noticed before.

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 07:40 (eighteen years ago)

I remember a writer remarking that whenever s/he came across a sentence he absolutely loved, s/he always took that as a signal that it had to be rewritten. I think the "rule" about passive voice works a bit the same: 95 times out of 100, the sentence probably can be rewritten in the active voice and will be better for it. Having a rule that forces you to critically reassess all your use of the passive voice is probably a good thing.

― mitya, Monday, 16 April 2007 07:47 (eighteen years ago)

xpost: I have checked and, by God, I had never noticed how more passive we are. ;-)

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 08:03 (eighteen years ago)

"It's particularly useful in the fields of history, science, and tragedy in which writers seek to establish distance from the phenomena they describe."

There's a good reason for that in science in particular, because it would be really annoying to read "And then I found..." "And then I observed..." Like reading an ethnography in which the author is so conscious of his bias or interference that you have to read between the lines of his own experience to actually learn anything about the culture he's observing, sometimes too much responsibility and closeness just gets in the way.

― Maria, Monday, 16 April 2007 08:04 (eighteen years ago)

xpost
OTM. Passive is being been by us a lot.

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 08:04 (eighteen years ago)

I'm a great fan of the passive voice, I was taught that technical writing should be in the passive voice wherever possible and it invades my everyday writing from that.

Yes, same here. "The ethanoic acid was heated for 20 minutes over an open Bunsen flame" vs "Ow, I burnd me hadn - it got ded hott".

― Michael Jones, Monday, 16 April 2007 08:31 (eighteen years ago)

I didn't care about the passive voice until I started my current job.

Now on the one hand I tear my hair out over it because it's EVERYWHERE in business writing - probably because businessmen are terribly keen to present the operation of the market as a science from which one might cultivate a certain professional distance.

And on the other I am truly thankful for it, as about half my copyediting assignments are along the lines of "We need this to be punchier", and by just going through and switching passive to active I can do the job in 5 minutes and have plenty of time left over for wasting on ILX.

― Groke, Monday, 16 April 2007 08:55 (eighteen years ago)

A BUCKET IS BEING HAD BY ME
NOOOOOOO MY BUCKET IS BEING TAKEN AWAY BY THEM

― Mark C, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:32 (eighteen years ago)

I didn't know what the passive voice was until I read this thread.

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:36 (eighteen years ago)

there must be lots of languages where such a construct isn't possible.

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:39 (eighteen years ago)

Everyone here sounding like Yoda is.

― mei, Monday, 16 April 2007 11:51 (eighteen years ago)

The money is under you.

― StanM, Monday, 16 April 2007 11:52 (eighteen years ago)

The only place where I was ever told that the active voice is vital was in my journalism classes. Active voice is generally a good way to keep your word count down while communicating as much as possible. It's less important if you're writing features, or reviews, or anything appearing after page 2, but if it's on the front page, you need to get as much information in as few words as possible, and most of the time, this means active voice. Passive is okay if the sentence would be useless otherwise, but if that's the case, there's usually a way to rephrase it to be more direct anyway, ie. Timothy needs to focus more on his studies and less on the other students, etc (kills the next sentence w/ one stone, blah blah blah)

― Will M., Monday, 16 April 2007 14:44 (eighteen years ago)

I think this is another "rule" that's actually more of a guideline: be conscious of what voice you're using, since active can often work a lot better than passive. As with Alfred's lit prof, however, it occasionally becomes an across-the-board directive, which is nonsensical. (See also: ending sentences with prepositions, splitting infinitives, etc.) I like to think of it as one of those "know the rule so you can then break it" situations.

― jaymc, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:45 (eighteen years ago)

I hate passive voice for the same reason that I use it - it leaves you room to squirm without saying anything definite. When I'm writing neuroscience essays or something that part is important.

― splates, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 04:47 (eighteen years ago)

will m, active voice is also vital in writing instructions, where you need to be absolutely clear that the person you are writing needs to do x, y and z (rather than x, y and z need to be done without saying who needs to do them), and in business writing or writing on the internet, when it is essential to get your point across in as few words as possible

― webber, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 09:08 (eighteen years ago)

at college when i plunged back into writing essays having been straight science for years through A-level and 1st year undergrad, it was like i was bleeding my skeleton through my skin. i unlearned all that passive structuring but not until someone pointed out that that is what it was, some months in, did it become really easy.

so, yeah what you all said. it has its place, but being aware of it, and working out if it is appropriate (is it making opinion seem more neutral etc) is key

― Alan, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 10:05 (eighteen years ago)

"passive voice is funnnier.

-- Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Monday, 16 April 2007 02:12 (Yesterday"

eg Mitch Hedberg?

― Frogman Henry, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 10:33 (eighteen years ago)

Strangely enough, this came up in the [MAJOR TEST PREP BRAND] GRE class that I'm taught tonight - we had a unit on writing tips for the essay section, and the first example of bad passive voice was "The Spanish American war was fought by brave and foolish men."

I find that much less awkward than "Brave and foolish men fought the Spanish American War" and I told my students, who didn't remember what passive voice was anyway and thus were probably further confused.

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 01:45 (eighteen years ago)

sorry, "that I taught tonight"

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 01:46 (eighteen years ago)

The passive voice befuddled you!

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Wednesday, 18 April 2007 02:17 (eighteen years ago)

"The attempted coup was an unmitigated disaster and Allende was confirmed by the Congress before taking office in November."

Anything wrong with that?

― Uptoeleven, Sunday, 29 April 2007 09:54 (eighteen years ago)

"the Congress confirmed Allende" uses eight fewer keystrokes

― webber, Monday, 30 April 2007 03:14 (eighteen years ago)

oh wait but then the sentence doesn't make sense, nm

― webber, Monday, 30 April 2007 03:15 (eighteen years ago)

It's technically a little wonky as it is, cause it acts like being confirmed by Congress was, like, incidental to taking office.

"The attempted coup was an unmitigated disaster. Allende was confirmed by the Congress and took office in November."

Or with a semi-colon or a dash up in there, nice.

― nabisco, Monday, 30 April 2007 14:32 (eighteen years ago)

I like that better. Always want to mix up my punctuation wherever I can and I don't use dashes as often as I should.

Thanks for sexing up my essay.

― Uptoeleven, Monday, 30 April 2007 16:21 (eighteen years ago)

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