Active vs. Passive Voice

Active and Passive Voice

It’s not uncommon for instructors to ask students to avoid using passive voice.  Lots of readers object to it.  Some people, following well-known advisors about matters of style like the British writer George Orwell or his famous American counterparts, William Strunk and EB White, even seem to regard passive voice as an error. 

But the truth is that passive voice isn’t really an “error” at all.  In fact, in some disciplines (like biology and chemistry), certain documents (like lab reports) actually require it (as in “the solution was placed in a beaker, which was heated over a Bunsen burner.”)  And if you don’t know who performed some action you’re writing about -- or if you decide that you don’t want to reveal who did it -- you pretty much have to use it (as in “a suggestion was made that we move forward without approval”).

In fact, it's often pointed out that both Orwell and Strunk and White use the passive voice themselves -- even in the very passages where they argue against it!*  

So long story short, passive voice is difficult or impossible to avoid entirely. 

Still, for many readers in disciplines outside the sciences, using passive voice may be understood as showing a tendency to be either stiffly over-formal -- keeping ideas at arm's length rather than dealing with them directly -- or, worse, sneaky and evasive about who's doing or thinking what. 

A faculty member we know in English and Creative Writing, for example, so emphatically denounces the potential evasive power of passive voice -- that is, how often it's used to hide who's performing the action in a sentence -- that her students have come to talk about active voice as a way of "naming names."  We totally get this.

That's why we think it's important that you're able to identify passive and active constructions and to develop a sense of what it means to use each in different contexts.**

Grammatical Explanation

Here’s how it works:

Most sentences are written in “active voice” – so the subject of the sentence performs its action.  Like:

Tom opened the door.

So “Tom,” the subject, performs the action, “opening” the door.  But how about:

The door was opened. 

That’s "passive voice."  We don’t know who opened the door, only that it was done. 

If we wanted to describe this more exactly, in the language of grammar, we’d say that in passive voice sentences, what’s normally the “direct object” (the receiver of the verb’s action – in this case, what Tom “opens”) becomes the subject of the sentence (“the door”).  And the verb is constructed with a form of “be” (in this case, “was”) plus the past participle form of the verb (in this case, “opened”). 

In fact, technically, even if we named the performer of the action in a prepositional phrase, like "The door was opened by Tom," it would still be a passive voice verb.  It's all about whether the subject really performs the verb and how the verb is constructred ("was opened" is passive).  It's also not about making your verbs somehow stronger or more emphatic, as people somehow suggest.  "Was" isn't a very strong verb in the sentence "He was old," but it is active.

Here are some more examples:

Active:  “She outlined a plan.”  Passive:  “A plan was outlined.”

Active:  “They gave him a gift.”  Passive:   “A gift was given to him.”

Active:  “We served dinner.”  Passive:  “Dinner was served.”

Notice also that passive voice verbs can be constructed in any verb tense you choose.  So:

“The door is opened.”  (simple present)

“The door will be opened.” (simple future)

“The door had been opened.” (past perfect)

“The door has been opened.” (present perfect)

“The door will have been opened.” (future perfect)

“The door was being opened.” (past progressive)

“The door is being opened.” (present progressive)

“The door will be being opened [usually when something else happens, like when he arrives, for example].” (future progressive)

Simple past tense (like the example we started with, “The door was opened”) is most common for passive voice.  Depending on what you’re trying to say, you probably use these other forms of passive voice verbs less often, though we do use them commonly, whenever the situation requires it.

Changing Passive to Active

If someone reading your work requires you to change to active voice, it’s probably easier than you think.  Just (1) figure out who or what really performs the action of the sentence, (2) make that the subject of the sentence, (3) change the form of the verb, and (4) turn the passive-voice subject into an object, so that it receives the action of the verb.  So:

Passive:  “The book was thrown out.”   Active:  “Ethan threw out the book.”

Passive:  “An important battle was won there.”    Active: “General Sherman won an important battle there.”

Passive:  “Permission was given for this action.”    Active:  “The governor gave permission for this action.”

*NOTE: In his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," Orwell writes "In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining)" -- two passive voice constructions, even as he advised against it!  Similarly, in The Elements of Style, Strunk and White offer:  “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place" -- more passive voice.  See Geoffery Pullum's "Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" for a spirited critique of this and other aspects of Strunk and White's widely revered The Elements of Style.

**NOTE:  Some people even talk about "middle voice" verbs, in which the form of the verb doesn't change even though the sentence subject still seems to receive the action in a sense -- like "That book reads easily" or "This golf course plays well on a rainy day."  That is, the readers are doing the reading, and the golfers are doing the playing, not the book or the course.  If you hear someone use the phrase "middle voice," that's what they mean.