Passive Voice

Most of us have been told that using passive voice is not good for our writing. I beg to differ. It MAY not be good, depending on the situation and the reader. The form can be quite useful indeed, but if it is not needed, we as writers should not use it.

In some situations, passive voice is necessary. For instance, in any situation where the action is more important than anything else, passive is essential. Think announcements. “Classes are dismissed.” Do we care who ordered the dismissal? I don’t know about most people, but all I care about is not showing up for classes when it isn’t necessary.

Think the methods section of any experimental research report. No one reading an article that details the results of experimental work cares that lab technician Suzy Jones did all the scut work. They need to know exactly how the experiment was done so they can evaluate the results or replicate the results. The focus is on the action not on the actor.

Consider also this situation: an engineering firm has a project that failed. Management needs to know why the project failed so that they can avoid similar failures in the future. Most reports like this are written in passive voice to avoid any implication of blame. If a bridge fails, management does not want to say, “Engineer Joe Bob did not take into account the soil in the area when designing the support columns. When the soil failed, the columns collapsed.” That wouldn’t be good policy, unless Joe Bob has a pink slip in his immediate future. The sentence is more likely to read, “The soils were not sufficiently analyzed, and the columns were not adequately designed to withstand…” That describes the problem without coming right out and saying Joe Bob was an idiot, and he may not have been. It might have been that management set deadlines that failed to allow sufficient time for soil testing.

If you think about it, that sort of report makes sense. The idea is to learn from your mistakes, to avoid repeating them in the future. It’s rather difficult to learn from your own mistakes if your supervisor is hunting for a scapegoat instead of actually looking at what happened. Again, the focus is on what happened, not on who did it.

So passives are a useful tool. If you look, I used a good number of passives in the previous five paragraphs. Did you notice?

Most people would not notice, because those passives are appropriate to the context and because I don’t use too many of them. In fact, I think that is the key: you choose to use passives, for legitimate reasons, in specific situations, in a particular context.

However, we often use passives for other, less legitimate, reasons. As one student told me, his teacher wanted 5,000 words for a report, so he filled his writing with redundancies, circumlocution, and passives to get to 5,000 words. He knew that if he didn’t get his word count up, the teacher would grade his paper down, no matter how good it was, because it did not meet the imposed word count. Was the report any better for it? No. In fact, it was probably worse.

I do think teachers often impose a specific word count for a reason—they know that a subject cannot be covered appropriately in fewer words. Unfortunately, what they end up with is not more content but just more words, more fluff. (That is a problem with the assignment, but let’s not get into that.)

Other people will use passives to actually hide the actor. Politicians, for instance, do not want to take credit for tax increases, so they say, “Taxes will be raised” instead of “We voted to raise taxes.” Honestly, now, which statement would you prefer?

During Operation Desert Storm, I recall watching an interview of an officer with a helicopter unit who flew patrol over the Iraqi desert. He was describing a mission in terms that I found quite engaging. They were flying over terrain that he described in some detail, finding and checking on several ground units, then scouting ahead for those units. At that point, his entire narrative changed. They had spotted a truck carrying Iraqi soldiers heading for one of the ground units. The officer said, “Ordnance was deployed.”

All right, what can we say about that? Generally, we don’t like to hear that our soldiers blew up a troop carrier and killed a number of people. I suspect the officer had been trained to use jargon and passives in answering such questions, not because he didn’t know what happened, but because it sanitizes and makes acceptable actions that a good many people would find objectionable. As to whether that is acceptable, that rather depends on your point of view.

I tend to be suspicious of people who use passives regularly because I get the impression that they are hiding something. And I start looking for what they are hiding.

We also tend to use passives because we see them regularly in publications in our fields. Everyone else is doing it, so that must be the right thing to do. Why shouldn’t we?

I’ll tell you: because passives are longer than active voice; because the construction is ponderous and difficult to read; because passives encourage the use of other constructions that add to the length of writing, making it still more unreadable. If the goal of writing is to communicate clearly and concisely, then passives are a problem.