I really enjoyed “Mistakes Are Made,” by Geoffrey Pullum, one of the writers on Lingua Franca, one of my new favorite blogs. We just had a whole conversation in my technical writing class about how to use and not to use the passive voice. I especially appreciated Pullum’s response to a colleague’s suggestion that he avoid the passive voice in an obituary he was writing:
The second passive my colleague fingered was this (which actually has a pair of them): “But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer.” The critical comment was:
Again, this is passive voice. Maybe appropriate here, I guess, but in general, I try to avoid the passive.
I was genuinely amazed. Am I seriously supposed to say “But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans”? And “when an oncologist named Price diagnosed her … “?
More generally, do the writing tutors of the world really think we should not report that a politician has been shot until we can specify the gunman? Do they honestly think it’s wrong to say that the lights are left on all night in an office building without supplying a list of the individuals who controlled the switches? We really have to get over this superstitious horror about passives. It’s gone beyond a joke.
The end of Pullum’s piece is especially nice, not because of the obvious “gotcha!” he plays on his colleague by counting the number of passive constructions in a book she wrote, but because the fact of the passive constructions he finds demonstrates that the passive is necessary. It’s time for the tyranny of the active voice to be brought to an end!
Yes, definitely. The passive voice can horribly overused, either to disguise the actor or to create a certain voice, but it’s also extremely useful when used appropriately.
I think the “no passive voice” thing is an example of trying to create concrete rules for the very slippery and subjective question of what counts as “good” writing. Instead of cautioning about overuse or misuse of the passive, which would be nuanced and subjective, it’s much easier to toss out a blanket rule.
Cool. I love discussions about language, and this is one I’ve been involved in. My husband was a scientist and is a medical student and there was a time when I felt like everything he wrote was just infested with the passive voice. Other scientists and engineers I’ve tutored have also had that issue, but I see it as a reflection of the way scientific papers are written and also of the students’ undeveloped writing skills. As my husband has become a much stronger and more confident writer over the years the passive voice has receded to become one tool, used when it enhances expression and understanding.
Ah, the passive voice issue. I write and edit other people’s writing for a living. I find myself coaching people over and over to lean away from the passive voice whenever they can make their writing clearer and more vigorous by using the active voice. Why? Because sometimes the passive voice IS the best way to write something. Too much of it makes a passage seem wishy-washy to me, but used well, it’s the elegant, clear, most direct way to say some things. All in good measure, all in good measure.
False controversy. Every style guide that I know allows the passive in at least two circumstances: when who or what did the action is really not known, and when its vagueness serves the larger aims of the writing or the writer. It’s the grammatical equivalent of an euphemism. For instance, with a touchy boss who has just done something horribly wrong, it is far better to say “Mistakes were made” than “You screwed up.”
In scientific writing, we typically use passive voice to remove the actors from the science. You want the science to stand on its own and separate from scientists who performed the work. But I try to use active voice when it works for the sentence.
Legal documents should never contain the passive voice. You will also note that well-drafted legal documents never use pronouns. This makes them clumsy to read, but no one is ever in doubt as to who is the subject of the sentence. (“He will then….” who??)
But we certainly don’t want to write ordinary prose by these rules. It would be completely unreadable. The passive voice has its place, but it is a limited one, and should not be used as a cloak for fuzzy thinking, as in the notorious “mistakes were made.” (Like the mistakes sort of wandered in and made themselves…..)
Passive voice is a difficult stylistic approach to master. Thus, when we are talking to new writers and people developing their craft, who are not Sam Clemens or Bob Hayes or other people of great innate writing talent, we advise them to eschew it. But we unfortunately do not generally tell them why (“you don’t know how to use it right yet”) and they get the idea that it’s eeeeeeevil.
My husband was a scientist and is a medical student and there was a time when I felt like everything he wrote was just infested with the passive voice. Other scientists and engineers I’ve tutored have also had that issue, but I see it as a reflection of the way scientific papers are written and also of the students’ undeveloped writing skills.
This is a common problem with my counseling students. “Families are believed to be…”. “Communication is seen as…”. “Family triangles are considered to be” (or worse yet, the ungrammatical “are considered as…” – the abuses perpetuated on prepositions are utterly baffling to me. They seem to have taken on an analogous role to the vowels that can all be pronounced as a schwa, in that they’ve become interchangeable in my students’ minds).
I see it as their attempt to insert their own opinions (or “something they just know”) without resorting to first person, when they’re too lazy to go find an actual source to attribute the idea to (or, more charitably, still haven’t internalized the idea that yes, you HAVE TO CITE SOURCES FOR YOUR STATEMENTS unless you are applying a concept to a case using your own clinical judgment, and even then you still have to cite sources for the concepts!)
The one that makes me cry is when they use the passive construction… and then cite the source. “Family triangles are considered to be a way of managing anxiety, Bowen says.”
You will also note that well-drafted legal documents never use pronouns.
No, I would not have noted that. Why do you think this is so? Legal writing isn’t any weirder than normal writing as far as using pronouns goes.
The Lingua Franca piece made me remember something I learned when I was getting my MA in TESOL and we briefly covered in one class the then very new field–as I recall–of comparative rhetoric, and what I remember is learning that in some cultures, Spanish-speaking ones in particular–the passive voice, or some version of it (or whatever is comparable in Spanish) is the expected form in certain kinds of academic writing. When I was teaching ESL classes regularly, I used to have conversations with Spanish speaking students who’d had at least a high school, and at least some college education their own language about how convoluted their writing was in English–at least in part because of their, to my sensibility, overuse of the passive voice. When I explained this as a cultural difference to them, it seemed to make sense and their writing in English improved stylistically pretty quickly. I am wondering if this sounds at all accurate to anyone reading here.
When I was teaching ESL classes regularly, I used to have conversations with Spanish speaking students who’d had at least a high school, and at least some college education their own language about how convoluted their writing was in English–at least in part because of their, to my sensibility, overuse of the passive voice. When I explained this as a cultural difference to them, it seemed to make sense and their writing in English improved stylistically pretty quickly.
There is a third-person singular form with a reflexive pronoun in Spanish that is very common in academic writing and a lot of other contexts, as well. Translators frequently render it in the passive voice, though it sounds much less passive in Spanish. The “Si se puede” that gave rise to “Yes we can” could just as easily be translated as “Yes, it is possible.” Not quite as stirring. ;-)
More broadly, Spanish-speakers tend to favor a very elevated, even flowery form of writing in academics, in literature and even in journalism. It often doesn’t work well in English if the translator or writer goes word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase. Translations that go for the sense of the thing usually sound better (to me). For the same reason, a lot of Spanish poetry sounds, to my ear, sacchrine and sentimental in English, when it is nothing of the sort in Spanish.
I think Pullum is unfair in rendering the active-voice alternatives as unnecessarily awkward.
When criticized for: “But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer.”
He writes: Am I seriously supposed to say “But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans”? And “when an oncologist named Price diagnosed her … “?
No.
But he could write: A diagnosis in December 2010 of metastasized and inoperable cancer disrupted all plans.
I think the passive voice is fine in the original piece, but the active voice is still stronger. I’m not as disciplined about this as I should be, but I still think it’s worthwhile to look at every use of passive voice, try to reword it and see how it sounds/reads. (I actually did this several times in the my previous comment because I was feeling self-conscious.) It’s silly to hold too fast to any grammar rule (“up with which I will not put” and so on), but many, many casual writers still overuse passive voice.
But he could write: A diagnosis in December 2010 of metastasized and inoperable cancer disrupted all plans.
That prioritizes the diagnosis, not the disruption. Which is ideal in some settings, less ideal in others.
e.g. (bad examples, but i’m in a rush)
How I switched from a homeowner to a renter:
I had planned to move to new york and write ad copy, and sold my home in anticipation of the move. But all plans were disrupted when I was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer. Since it seemed unreasonable to buy again….
How I came to be interested in alternative medicine:
I had planned to move in new york and write ad copy, and had sold my things in anticipation of the move. A diagnosis in December 2010 of metastasized and inoperable cancer disrupted all plans. Since it was clear that modern medicine had no hopes for my survival…
The first one emphasizes the effect of the diagnosis on the non-medical stuff. the second one emphasizes the diagnosis. Context and goal are everything. Both passive and active have a place.
The first one emphasizes the effect of the diagnosis on the non-medical stuff. the second one emphasizes the diagnosis. Context and goal are everything. Both passive and active have a place.
Agreed. I think the important thing is to be conscious about which you’re using and why.
My point is that it’s one thing to defend the passive voice because it better expresses what you want to say or emphasize, and it’s another to defend it based on a claim that the active voice sounds really bad – and then support that claim by making it sound much worse than it needs to.
But he could write: A diagnosis in December 2010 of metastasized and inoperable cancer disrupted all plans.
Ugh, that’s nasty. That’s worse than his examples. The verb is WAY too far from the subject, plus it sounds much too passive as a phrase. Just because a verb has a legitimate subject doesn’t mean it’s not passive in a layman’s sense.
And, now I think of it, “all plans” at the end of that sentence seems ambiguous, and would be presumably more ambiguous if the plans referred to were in the previous sentence.
but I still think it’s worthwhile to look at every use of passive voice, try to reword it and see how it sounds/reads
Why? Do you look at every use of active voice? I’m sure if you did you’d find plenty of places where you should replace an active with a passive.
Active voice and passive voice are both entirely legitimate writing tools. “Active voice” does not mean your writing is active and “passive voice” does not mean your writing is passive. Avoiding passive sentences (which is good advice) doesn’t mean in the slightest that you should avoid passive VOICE.
I had the opposite reaction.
Strunk & White’s Element’s of Style recommends to “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” So when I compare the two sample sentences above, I find more drama in the first sentence. It begins as if the sentence were about the annoyance of disrupted plans, only to reveal that the sentence is really intended to disclose that the subject of the sentence had received a sentence of terminal cancer. At a gut level, I can imagine that this simulates the author’s actual emotional experience: initial annoyance when learning that Joe won’t be able to fulfill their plans, but those feelings being utterly displaced when the author learns the reason for the change in plans.
In contrast, the second sentence seems syncopated, almost comical. My gut is primed to look for the dramatic part of the sentence at the end, yet my mind recognizes that the drama occurs in the middle, and the concluding remarks about disrupted plans are merely incidental.
I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s (slightly misquoted) remark, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Both by logic and by sentence structure, the reader is primed to expect Mark Twain to end that sentence with an emphatic denial that he’s dead. Consequently the understatement “exaggerated” seems all the more incongruous and funny.
My larger point is this: In order to locate the most dramatic idea of a sentence at the end, I find I often need to use the passive voice.
I agree that passive voice (and pronouns) can reflect ambiguity. And I used to share the view that well-crafted legal documents should not contain ambiguity. I no longer do.
I now believe that the art of drafting involves creating documents that faithfully reflect the intent of the parties AND NOTHING MORE. To the extent that the parties fail to address some contingency – and they always do – the faithful drafter will draft in a manner that avoids pre-judging the issue.
Not infrequently, a drafter engages in persuasive speech a/k/a propaganda. This drafter may want to draft in a manner that not merely refrains from prejudicing unresolved issues, but that also refrains from calling attention to all the issues that remain unresolved.
Think about it. In practice, judicial decisions follow one of two patterns:
– “The general rule is X -> Y. The record reveals X. Ergo Y.”
– “The general rule is X -> Y. The record reveals X. But there is an exception to the general rule which applies in this instance and ergo NOT Y.”
In other words, the law provides mechanisms to get a set of facts to a variety of conclusions. The judge reaches a conclusion, and then articulates a set of principles that lead from the facts to the conclusion – and will typically also conceal all the other principles that might have led to different conclusions.
The point is not that the judge makes a wrong or arbitrary decision. The point is that the rationale a judge offers for her decision will inevitably be, at best, a partial rationale. If a judge really wanted to provide a thorough account of all the possible principles that the judge might have applied to a case, and why she chose one set of principles over all the others, the judge would need to write a treaties for every decision. For better or worse, judges don’t do that.
In sum: Among mortals, legal drafting will always leave some matters unresolved. Thus, legal drafting always involves ambiguity. Whether that ambiguity gets concealed via the use of passive voice and pronouns, or by other means, is really incidental.
Why? Do you look at every use of active voice? I’m sure if you did you’d find plenty of places where you should replace an active with a passive.
No. No, I wouldn’t. Passive voice is extremely natural to most of us because it’s easier to describe a world in which things just somehow happen. My house was foreclosed on. I was robbed. The protestors were shot. How did that happen? Who did that? It’s always easier not to say.
In my comment @11, I replaced the passive with the active voice four times and kept the passive voice once because it properly emphasized what I wanted to say. Of the four time I changed it, one was somewhat superfluous and didn’t improve the sentence, but it didn’t make it worse either. Before I made those changes, I think there was one sentence that used active voice. Most writers don’t have a problem with overusing the active voice.