More on passives

(Hiatus from blogging because of editing the last couple of weeks. I’ve had as many as six manuscripts—including two reports, a thesis, articles that keep coming, and a book chapter—sitting on my computer desktop and emails from writers weeping about deadlines. I’m down to two—the thesis and the book chapter, but I have to get those done soon because another thesis is on its way and at least two or three more articles are in the pipeline. I think everyone I know went to work this summer to have a half a dozen articles ready to go by fall, and now they all want it fixed yesterday.)

So, passives. I’ve mentioned that passives aren’t necessarily bad, but that they do cause problems with conciseness and with clarity. Perhaps we should talk about how to identify them.

Simple answer: turn on the computer grammar checker. I recall telling my husband, after his stint with the federal government and their idiotic writing rules, that his writing was full of passives. If he wanted to keep the page limits required by journals, or at least avoid paying the extra page charges, he needed to identify them and get rid of as many as possible. He didn’t believe me until grammar checkers turned up, and then he discovered that nearly every one of his sentences had a nice squiggly green line under it. 

I said it was the simple answer, but it’s not the complete answer. Grammar checkers use simple rules to find what MAY be passives, but they are wrong about 40% of the time. Worse yet, as we said before, passives are not always bad. Sometimes you need them. So if you take a grammar checker’s word for it, you’ll be revising a lot of writing that doesn’t need revising for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve had students tell me that other teachers (usually in high school) told them never to use any form of the verb to be. From what I can tell, the teachers never explained why, although that may have been inadequate reporting from the students instead of inadequate teaching. I suspect that teachers who tell their students not to use am, is, are, was, and were are trying to prevent their students from using passives. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work. 

Let me explain. (Those who know something about the English language have my permission to skip this. I’m over-simplifying.)

English generally has two types of sentences. One type is what I call a subject-linking verb-completer sentence (S-LV-C). These sentences use verbs that operate much like an equals symbol (=). 

• The man is thirsty.
• The woman is a doctor.
• The dog seems friendly.
• The football player turned pale.
• Bread becomes stale quickly in a dry climate.

Note that in each case what follows the verb says something describing (or completing) the subject. The subject is not doing anything. The most common linking verb is to be. If you do what your high school English teacher instructed, you will be eliminating perhaps half of all the sentences you want to use. That’s not a good plan. Much of what we write about involves a state a being, not a state of doing.

Actually, these types of sentences are the least likely to be turned into passives. It’s just too awkward. However, if you write one of them and turn on the grammar checker, most of the time the grammar checker will tell you that you may have a passive and would you please review what you have done.

The other type of sentence we typically use is the action (not active) sentence, where the verb involves some action that the subject is doing.

• Birds fly south in the winter.
• Cows eat grass.
• Farmers grow corn.
• That dog bites people.

In this sort of sentence, we have the actor (birds, cows, farmers, dog), the action (fly, eat, grow, bites), and in some cases the acted upon or object of the verb (grass, corn, people). South, by the way, is not an object, just so you know. It’s an adverb.

This type of sentence is the kind that gives trouble. Every sentence that has subject-verb-object (S-V-O) can be written as passive (which isn’t necessarily bad, as I keep saying).

• Grass is eaten by cows.
• Corn is grown by farmers.
• People are bitten by that dog.

Note that, in every case, the sentence is longer in passive voice than in active voice. That’s problem number one. 

Problem number two? In English, we use position to determine a word’s role in the sentence. We don’t use word endings much. So in a basic sentence like S-V-O, we expect the actor to come first, the action to come second, and the acted upon to come third. What happens if the object comes first and the actor comes last? We have to rethink the entire sentence, and very often, we have to reread the sentence, especially the long ones. That takes time we could better spend doing something else.

Problem number three? In passive sentences, it is easy to leave essential information out. At that point, especially in technical and scientific writing, we have a very real problem. We must have all the essential information. Let’s have a closer look at this. Consider the following scenario:

You have a son who played with the neighbor’s dog. The dog bit the boy. You take your son to the emergency room and run in yelling, “The boy was bitten! The boy was bitten!” What is the first question the ER people will ask?

>> 

Wrong. They’ll ask if you have insurance (/facepalm). I’ve been telling that same joke for the last 20 years. I must stop.

Think about it though. You have left out a critical piece of information. Does it make a difference if the boy was bitten by a dog as opposed to say, a tick? Proper treatment requires complete information. 

Good science requires complete information. Passives get in the way.