What passive voice is (and isn't)
/Permit me a moment of annoyance.
It’s become apparent to me, through years of reading, that a lot of professional writers don’t know what passive voice is. I emphasize that I’m noticing this in professional writers, because these are people who should know better. Here’s the passage that finally broke me, from a long-form essay on cognitive dissonance within the pro-life movement:
A friend of mine was at a big conservative Christian donor conference recently and told me a prominent speaker there used the phrase, “women who have experienced an abortion.” . . .
This extreme passive voice expression goes beyond saying that women who abort their babies are victims who don’t deserve moral blame; it treats abortion as something that just happens to a woman. . . .
Emphasis mine.
Here’s the thing—the phrase the writer here picks out is not written in the passive voice. It’s vague, clunky, and awkward, an unnecessary circumlocution, but it is not passive. What the writer means here is everything I’ve just said about the phrase’s construction, with the added implication that the use of this phrase betrays deceitful intent, but it is not passive.
So, a brief, highly annoyed primer on what passive voice is (and is not):
Passive voice is not:
Any sentence including the verb “to be.” This should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Because to be is a passive sentence’s auxiliary or “helping verb,” this can trip people up. As I’ve argued before, reliance on to be in your writing can weaken it, but that’s not the same thing as the passive voice. Here’s an example from way back of an otherwise careful and observant writer striking blindly at any passing be verb in hopes of hitting a passive construction.
The progressive aspect. This is, in any verb tense, a construction that indicates than an action is ongoing. Above, I wrote that I am noticing this trend. I am still the subject of the sentence, and I am doing something. This is the active voice, even if the main verb is still to be. See above.
Vagueness. This is the real bone of contention for the writer quoted above, and I’ve noticed “passive voice” or “passive language” used disparagingly of vagueness, bureaucratese, or other (usually official, almost always political) obfuscation and deceit—what Dilbert calls “weasel words.” I hate these forms of linguistic shiftiness as much as anyone, but obscuring your meaning behind jargon or constructing statements so as to diffuse or avoid blame is not, in itself, the passive voice.
Passive voice is:
Not a particular usage, tone, or even intent, but a grammatical voice—that is, per Britannica, the “form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself.” To demonstrate using the classic example:
Active: The pitcher threw the ball.
Passive: The ball was thrown by the pitcher.
There are two “participants” in this “narrated event”: the ball and the pitcher. In one, the pitcher (actively) acts upon the ball; in the other, the ball is (passively) acted upon by the pitcher.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. This shouldn’t be hard.
How to identify the passive voice
Here’s a simple way to identify passive voice constructions: you should be able to ask By whom? or By what? of them. Asking these questions of a passive sentence highlights the fact that the “participant” that would ordinarily function as the subject of the sentence has gone missing as the action has been inverted. So:
“Mistakes were made.” (The classic weasel word statement.) By whom?
“The town was destroyed.” By what?
“The generalissimo is being overthrown.” By whom?
“The cornfield has been destroyed.” By what?
“It is said that money cannot buy happiness.” By whom?
Now compare a few other sentences (or fragments) that I’ve seen incorrectly labeled “passive” online:
“Women who have experienced an abortion.” A fragment in the first place, but as it’s the women who are doing the experiencing, this is still grammatically the active voice.
“This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Whatever this is, it’s doing the unfolding, and despite its clunkiness this sentence is still written in the active voice.
“The suspect’s death at the hands of police appears to be entirely unjustified.” Chop out all but the grammatical essentials and this reads death (subject) appears to be (verb) unjustified (predicate). This is an overcomplicated and clunky sentence, but not passive.
Conclusion
If when you describe some language as “passive” you mean written in the passive voice, with what would normally be the object in the subject’s place but being acted upon, then more power to you.
But if when you say this you mean that the language in question is deceitful, misleading, obfuscating, suspiciously hedging, or simply a lie—if, that is, your problem is not with the speaker’s grammar but with his motives—then say that. You’ll be more accurate and, what is more, you’ll make your own meaning clearer.
