Now I want to consider in more detail what some of the advisers on usage actually say
about passives, and I’ll start with the book that I hate the most: the Elements of
Style by William Strunk and E.B.
White.
This is a passage that goes right back to Strunk’s first edition in 1918.
Yes, the book is now nearly a hundred years old.
This is Strunk’s first illustration of what a passive clause is.
He says the active voice is more direct and vigorous than the passive, so you should write
“I shall always remember my first visit to Boston” because it’s much better than
“My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me”.
Now what he says about that inept passive is that it’s less direct, less bold, less
concise, but really: think about the information structure condition that I’ve just treated
earlier.
It’s in direct violation of that.
The utterer of any sentence is always old information unless stressed to contrast with
somebody else, because there’s always going to be an utterer.
So the sentence “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me” violates
the condition.
There’s nothing new in the by-phrase there.
The first visit to Boston is newer than the information in the by-phrase which is merely
that it’s me, the speaker.
It’s basically dishonest to introduce passives with an example like that, because if you’re
going to talk about passives and what they are used for, you should at least pick one
that could have been useful, that doesn’t violate any fundamental condition in the grammar
of English.
But, as Strunk goes on to talk about passives, he gets vaguer and vaguer after that rather
dishonest beginning and starts saying things like “The habitual use of the active voice[,
however,] makes for forcible writing…
Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting
a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as ‘there is’
or ‘could be heard’”.
Then Strunk and White give a tableau of four pairs of examples.
On the left, there’s supposed to be a passive, and on the right, there’s supposed to be
an active transitive replacing it.
But look at the examples closely: the first one says “There were a great number of dead
leaves lying on the ground”.
Now the trouble with that is, that’s not a passive.
There’s no passive in there at all.
You can just look at it and see: no past participle or anything.
You could replace it by “Dead leaves covered the ground”, which is admittedly shorter,
but it’s nothing to do with replacing the passive by an active.
The second pair of examples has, on the left, “At dawn the crowing of the rooster could
be heard.”
That is a passive, but look at the counterpart on the right: “The cock’s crow came with
dawn”.
‘Came’ is not a transitive verb, so this is not a replacement of a passive by an active
transitive at all.
They just made a mistake there.
They’re demonstrating a substitution of some kind, but it’s not a substitution of
a passive by its active counterpart, an active transitive verb with a direct object.
Now look at the third pair: “The reason that he left college is that his health became
impaired”.
‘Impaired’ there is just an adjective.
‘Became’ doesn’t take passive complements.
That’s why you can’t say “President Kennedy became assassinated.”
There’s no passive on the left, though there is an active transitive on the right.
And the fourth rather cumbersome example, on the left, again, there’s no passive in
there at all.
The fact that you could replace it by what they show on the right is irrelevant to talking
about passives and actives.
So they had four shots at this, four attempts to show us a passive clause with an improvement
created by replacing it by a transitive active clause, and not a single one illustrates the
point.
That’s what I call incompetence.