Numerous people have written in published sources about other people’s prose or occasionally
just about prose in general involving passive voice, and have shown very clearly that they
don’t even know how to tell an active from the passive. I want to give you a few examples
of exactly that.
Tim Levell has a BBC blog post about how to write about upsetting events like school shootings
without being upsetting. “We use passive constructions,” he says. “‘Five girls
have died’, not ‘The man went in and shot five girls’”. But “five girls have died”
is not a passive; it’s a simple intransitive clause. He doesn’t know what a passive is,
and yet it’s crucial to the advice he’s giving.
I heard Steve Inskeep interviewing a US army general on National Public Radio in the USA,
saying “Let’s put it in the passive tense: there was a ceasefire agreement in Southern
Afghanistan with some members of the Taliban at some time”. But the passive isn’t a
tense, and there are no passive clauses in the example that he gave. I don’t know what
he was trying to get at, but he doesn’t know what a passive is.
Paul JJ Payack, in a blog post about the presidential debates in 2008, calls President Obama’s
“There will be setbacks and false starts” a passive. Payack says “He’s spreading
the responsibility around. He doesn’t [didn’t] say ‘I will have setbacks. I will be wrong…’
[…] He uses [used] the passive voice…” Well, no he didn’t. There is no passive
in “There will be setbacks and false starts.” Payack is apparently groping for some way
in which that is evasive, but it is nothing to do with the use of the passive.
Marie Murray wrote an article in the Irish Times called “Weapons of Denial”, and
she said: “The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal
apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say[,] “I’m
sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit to say “It is regrettable”. Instead of
saying “I made a mistake” the abstract term “mistakes happened” can be evoked.”
Well, neither “it is regrettable” nor “mistakes happened” is a passive. Whatever
she’s talking about, it’s nothing to do with passive constructions.
Jon Fine had an article in Business Week about a plugin for the Firefox browser called “SpinSpotter”
that will allegedly identify rhetorical devices as passives. An algorithm that can spot your
passives. “Passive voice” he says, “example: A story says “bombs land” without stating
which party is responsible for them.” But “bombs land” is an active clause with
a simple intransitive verb ‘land’. Nothing to do with the passives.
Here’s another one. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, once described as
the most influential commentator in America, was talking about President Obama’s apparently
“gentle” treatment of Muslims. “On religious tolerance,” says Krauthamer, “he gently
references [referenced] the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the
‘divisions between Sunni and Shia have lead to [tragic] violence’ (note the use of passive
voice)” Krauthamer says. But there isn’t any use of passive voice. “Divisions between
Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence” is not a passive clause. It doesn’t contain
any passive of any kind.
Law professor Richard A. Epstein in the Hoover Institution wrote for the institution’s
journal “Defining Ideas” that “instead of suggesting policies to reduce the impact
of government on production, Obama reverts into a lament for the lost middle class. He
notes that our economic engine has, over time, “began [sic] to stall”:… But his careful
use of the passive voice — the engine “began to stall” — conceals that he has no explanation
of the ebbs and falls of the overall system.” However, ‘began to stall’ is not a passive
construction.
Nancy Franklin writing in the New Yorker commenting on fraudster Bernie Madoff, having said about
his Ponzi scheme “I believed it would end soon”: “…he betrayed no sense of how
absurd it was to use the passive voice to refer [in regard] to his scheme, as though
[if] it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him”. Well, although Madoff
does appear to speak as if the possibility of his criminal misdeeds ending were independent
of his own volition, “it will end soon” is not in the passive voice. Nancy Franklin
doesn’t know what’s an active and what’s a passive.
A writing teacher at Boston University, complaining about undergraduates’ excuses, wrote about
a student who had sent in a plane ticket stub accompanied by a breezy e-mail: “thought
I would be able to return by tonight, but it does not appear that that will be in the
cards”. And the writing teacher says “I found the switch to the passive in the latter
clause of that sentence to be extremely irritating, as if he were freeing himself from blame.
If you’re going to be absent just own up to it like a responsible human being.” So
let’s look back at that passive. “It does not appear that will be in the cards.” That’s
not a passive. It’s not even remotely similar to a passive in any way.
All of these examples offer clear evidence that something’s wrong with the general
educated public’s view of what passives are, because nothing like a passive is being
presented. Though you could say that each of them, in some vague sense, the suggestion
is made that agency is not being identified, responsibility is not being located on the
appropriate persons. However, when we go on and look for further examples, we soon find
that you can’t always account for it, however vaguely, in those sort of terms.
Take the example of Brad DeLong, who’s a well-known blogger, and lists in one of his
posts uses of the passive that he says you can find in an English translation of a passage
by Wolfgang Mommsen. He quotes: “The misfortune that misfell Germany and Europe… The Reich had to face
a superior coalition… The war turned out to be… The… situation that isolated Germany…
It was above all the bloody reckoning…” That’s five examples, and not one of them
actually illustrates the use of the passive voice at all. De Long suggests there should
be alternatives that focus more attention on agency. But what he proposes as improvements
to these sentences are often radical restructurings. He proposes replacing “the Reich had to
face a superior coalition” by “the German government struck first and struck at Belgium
and France, creating the coalition of Russia, France, and Britain that it then fought”.
But the replacement is almost triple the length, and has a new subject, “the German government”
that is referentially the same as the original “the Reich”. Nothing about the passive
is the slightest bit relevant to the original example or the replacement. Completely baffling
if you’re genuinely looking for something about passives in there.
A letter by Dave Bruce of Hoboken, it was addressed to the public editor of the New
York Times about a correction to a Maureen Dowd column, and the complainer says “The
passive-voice note that she ‘failed to attribute a paragraph’ tends [seems] to play down
what actually occurred” but “Maureen Dowd’s column failed to attribute a paragraph”
is in the active, not the passive. And Dowd is clearly identified as the responsible party
for the failure. So this is nothing to do with responsibility not being tied down.
Perhaps the most worrying thing is that we find in handbooks for writers that the same
sort of mistakes turn up again and again. There’s a book called “The Aspen Handbook
for Legal Writers” by Deborah Bouchoux, and you can find in there the following: “Most
sentences that include dangling modifiers are written in the passive voice. Changing
to active voice corrects the dangling modifier because the actor or subject is identified
in the phrase that begins the sentence. Example: When a boy, my father changed careers (passive
voice) When I was a boy, my father changed careers (active voice, actor identified in
modifying phrase)”. Now there is a sense in which “when a boy” doesn’t identify
a sort of subject: intuitively, someone was a boy, but who? That’s not given. But this
is nothing to do with actives or passives at all.
The BBC News has a style guide, which in its 2003 edition, now changed I believe, suggested
we should compare these examples. The first is in the passive, the second active. And
the first example says “There were riots in several towns in Northern England last
night, in which police clashed with stone-throwing youths.” There’s no passive clause in
that.
The Canadian Press Stylebook is another style book for journalists, a standard usage guide
for all work- all journalist work in Canada. Under common faults, it says the following:
“Active vs. passive … Think of active verbs as power words — words that drive
your sentences, keep the reader’s attention and move her briskly along. Not: The economy
experienced a quick revival. But: The economy revived quickly.” What’s amazing about
that example is that “The economy experienced a quick revival” is an active transitive,
but that’s the one that is alleged to be a passive. There’s another pair of examples:
“At first light there was no sign of the ship”. That’s supposed to be bad because
of its being a passive. It isn’t a passive. It’s supposed to be replaced by “The ship
vanished in the night”, which, by the way, is not an active transitive.
It’s just amazing that people who are writing about grammar from a position of presumed
authority cannot tell the difference between active and passives.
There’s a website called Grammarist.com that has a section on active voice and passive
voice, and it's, I think, the most baffling yet. It says “In the active voice, ‘to’
is usually dropped from the infinitive. For example, in this example ‘to’ is dropped
from the infinitve ‘to stay’: He should stay in Reno, where he belongs. If the same
thought were expressed in the passive voice, the ‘to’ would remain: I urge him to stay
in Cable where he belongs”. There is no passive in “I urge him to stay in Cable”.
I have no idea what this particular site is getting at.
There’s a large corporation that has a style guide, and I’m not allowed to say which
corporation because the person who wrote to me about it works for that corporation and
was worried about being fired, I think, and it says “Use active voice rather than the
passive voice. Active voice is easier to read. Instead of ‘we have decided’, write ‘we
decided’. Instead of ‘we will be implementing a programme’, write ‘we are implementing
a program’. This appears to be a confusion of having auxiliary verbs, or having extra
auxiliary verbs, with the notion of being a passive clause. There are no passives in
the examples there.
The examples I’ve just been reviewing have this huge array of different kinds of construction
that have been mistaken for passives, and they include predicative complements (like
“his health became impaired” or “he was very sorry” or “is regrettable”
or “is dead” or “is responsible for” and so on), simple active intransitives (like
“bombs land”, “girls have died”, “mistakes happened”), active intransitives with infinitival
complements (like “turned out to be”, “began to stall”, “failed to attribute”),
and most surprising of all simple active transitives that are alleged to be passives (like “changed
careers”, experienced a quick revival, “implementing a program”, “duties included”, “actions
encompassed”, “misfortune befell Germany”, “face a superior coalition”, “isolated
Germany”, “clearing the Senate judiciary committee”, “allowed the story over race
to bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama’s presidency”). Some of these
are from examples I didn’t even read out. But no folk rhetorical property, no sort of
commonly understood rhetorical notion could possibly yoke together a diverse array of
constructions like this. There isn’t any generally understood notion that covers all
of these cases. It’s not as if I’m requiring that everyone should use the term ‘passive’
to mean what I think it should mean. It’s got a meaning that refers to something in
grammar and there isn’t any meaning it could possibly have to cover the kinds of examples
that I just picked out of the literature. What’s going on is people having the fuzziest
notion that passive is somehow clumsy, verbose, vague or bad, so they see a piece of writing
that they don’t really feel that they like very much and they just call it passive in
the hope that that’s the right term for it.
This is what you find in a huge array of usage literature: that it’s incompetent in addressing
the properties of the text that it’s trying to critique. It’s no use to you whatsoever
if you’re asking for advice on how you can write better.