ACTIVE vs. PASSIVE VOICE

One of the most common suggestions teachers make to help students improve their writing is the advice to avoid the passive voice. Behind the terminology is a good impulse: the active voice makes your writing more vigorous and interesting, whereas passive can seriously hinder its flow. So knowing what the passive is, and when to use it, is a helpful skill for writers.

When we write in active voice, we connect the subject of the sentence with the action it is initiating. That means that readers can clearly see who is responsible for the action in a sentence. Take this example:

Richard fired Archie.

initiator action recipient

That's active voice: the subject initiates an action that affects the recipient.

In passive voice, the recipient becomes the subject, and the initiator of the action sneaks away to the prepositional phrase at the end of the sentence. Now all the attention is on the recipient, who becomes the grammatical subject..

Archie was fired by Richard.

recipient action initiator

In a simple revision, the initiator can disappear altogether, so that readers don't know who is responsible for the action (this may or may not be a good thing):

Archie was fired.

recipient action (no initiator)

These are simple sentences, but these principles also apply in more complex ones.

In 1973, President Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was close to indicting the President.

We can clearly see who did the firing in this sentence: Nixon. That's active voice.

Now compare the passive version:

In 1973, Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was close to indicting the President, was fired by President Nixon.

Here Nixon has moved away from the center of the action, and the subject of the sentence (Cox) seems somehow more responsible for the firing because the sentence grammar focuses our attention on him.

Now compare this passive version, which deletes the responsibility all together:

In 1973, Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was close to indicting the President, was fired.

Whose fault was the firing? Only one name is mentioned--Cox's. Nixon has disappeared, so no one is present in the sentence to take responsibility for this action. Passive voice not only makes the sentence longer and more diluted, but also hides the true initiator of the action from readers' eyes.

Of course, there are some exceptions to the "Avoid passives" rule. Writers in the natural and social sciences choose passive when they want to put their emphasis on the results of an experiment or an observation, or the outcome of an historical event.

These phenomena were observed in seventy-one of ninety-three subjects.
Recipient (Observer not named; implication is that any observer would see the same phenomena.)

When the ballots were counted, Kennedy’s margin of victory was the narrowest in history. 
		Recipient (Identity of counter isn’t important.)

And there are a few common phrases that always use the passive, like this one.

Elvis Presley was born in 1935.
Recipient (Mrs. Presley did the work, but she isn’t important in this  sentence.)

The passive most professors want students to avoid is the thoughtless passive–the one that slips in without conscious choice. It dilutes the impact of a piece of writing, slows the flow, and increases the length of the sentence by as much as 40%, all of which make the writing less interesting to a reader. So take the time to choose your passives carefully if you want your writing to have energy!

EXERCISE

Identify and convert the passive voice constructions in the following paragraph to active voice. We have sabotaged the language in this paragraph from an essay by Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple called "The Power of Women Through the Family in Medieval Europe, 500-1100", in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (University of Georgia, 1988), p. 91.

The importance of the queen's role was recognized by the Carolingians through their practice of having their queens anointed and crowned to make them sharers in the king's power. Along with Pepin, the first Carolingian monarch, his wife Bertha was formally crowned and considerable political power was exercised by her in the period after his death. Praise of the queen was also incorporated into the hymns of praise which were sung as part of the medieval liturgy. The importance of the queen's position in the early medieval empire was recognized by contemporaries in the use of such lofty titles as consors regis (royal consort).