What is the passive voice?
It’s something most of us have seen at some point. Especially in the early days of MS Word’s grammar checker, it was something I remember seeing the passive voice a lot when writing essays and school assignments. I didn’t really understand what it meant at the time, although I do now!
So, what is the passive voice? Essentially it’s the order of the sentence. So the subject becomes the object, and the verb happens to it rather than the subject doing the verb. It’s become passive. If the subject is doing the verb to the object, then it becomes active. Yeah, I know it’s probably still not clear. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples so you can see what I mean.
Passive vs Active voice
A classic scene from a classic novel and movie, let’s look at what happens in The Wizard of Oz at the beginning when the cyclone hits.
“The house was carried away by the cyclone.”
vs
“The cyclone carried the house away.”
Which one is in the passive voice, and which is in the active voice? Hopefully you got it right. The first one is passive: the house is the object being acted upon by the verb ‘carried’ and the subject ‘the cyclone’. The second sentence is active: the subject ‘the cyclone’ is acting ‘carried’ on the object ‘the house’. So they are different ways of looking at it, but both sentences do effectively say the same thing.
The difference is where the focus is placed by the word order, which will affect the impact of the sentence. It shifts the readers focus onto the subject and the action the verb is describing. The subject is doing something to the object, rather than the object having something done to it.
An easy way to spot the passive voice is to look for the ‘was’ or ‘is’ before the verb. You might be able to make passive sentences without these words but most of them will have one of these in it before the verb.
Is it always wrong?
That depends. Often you will find it being flagged by grammar checking software (such as the aforementioned MS Word) and even the SEO and Readability scoring software on this WordPress Editor. I get frowny faces if I use too much passive voice. This is likely because often passive voice is less engaging and interesting to read. Active voice gives your words more impact for your reader.
That said, everything you write has a purpose and you might choose to use the passive voice to direct your reader’s attention to something else. You may even want it to be misleading in some way, or to ‘soften the blow’, so to speak. That said, it is the general consensus that you should use the active voice the majority of the time. Certainly if you are writing advertising copy or another kind of persuasive writing, the passive voice will lessen the impact significantly. So when you are editing, proofreading or writing, it’s something to be conscious of and evaluate if there is a more impactful way to say what you want to say.
Thanks for reading! Remember, for more tips and tricks, subscribe to get an email every time there’s a new post. I’m posting three times a week on here. If you want some help with your writing, including spotting the passive voice, get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to help you out! Any questions or thoughts, the comments are open!
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