I’ve seen all sorts of allegations about passives. I’ll just review five of them
for you very briefly. I’ll just consider how serious these are as criticisms of passive
clauses. We’ve already seen that people who use them actually can’t identify passive
clauses. In a sense, they don’t know what they’re talking about. But they allege that
passives are, first, verbose and wordy; second, that they’re dull and static instead of
being lively and dynamic; third, that they’re sneaky or evasive concerning agency and responsibility;
fourth, that they are feeble and weak rather than bold and strong; and fifth, that they’re
avoided by good writers. All of these are unsupported and, I think, clearly false.
First consider “verbose and wordy”. The maximum number of extra words that you get
just because you use the passive is two. You get an instance of ‘be’ in some passives,
and if you choose a long passive you get one instance of ‘by’, so those two little
monosyllables are added in some cases. But if you have a look at the numbers in real
texts, most of the passives that occur are short passives. They don’t have the ‘by’
phrase, so there isn’t an extra ‘by’ in there. And some of them don’t have ‘be’.
And the total amount that you could save if you avoided all passive clauses is roughly
zero. The maximum would be something like 0.6% in the total number of words needed,
but usually the saving would be approximately zero. So we can forget about the idea of passives
as wordy and lengthy.
Now the allegation about dullness and staticness. In the Wikipedia article on the president
John F Kennedy, the section on assassination begins “President Kennedy was assassinated
in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 PM CST on November 22nd, 1963.” It’s as sharp and shocking
and direct as you could possibly want. There’s no sense in which it would be an improvement
to replace that by some active clause, which would have to have a mention of Lee Harvey
Oswald, who wasn’t identified until much later. It’s absolutely as sharp and clear
and dynamic as you could imagine. It’s shocking. The charge of it being dull and static is
just nonsense.
How about the charge of passives being sneaky and evasive? This takes us back, I think,
to Sherry Roberts’ astonishing suggestion that a sentence written in the active voice
is the straight-shooting sheriff who faces the gunslinger proudly and fearlessly, is
honest and straightforward. You know where you stand. Whereas a sentence written in passive
voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in
the back, stealing his horse and sneaking out of town. Sherry Roberts gives two examples,
and I will say this for her, they are accurate in that the active one is an active and the
passive one is a passive. She gives “The committee will review all applications in
early April” and the passive is “In early April, all applications will be reviewed by
the committee”. So that’s fine… by the way, she unthinkingly uses a passive when
she says the bare passive “has been written in passive voice” when she’s talking about
this. But think about her charge about dishonesty, evasiveness and shooting the sheriff in the
back, and all that stuff. In early April, all applications will be reviewed by the committee…
what is left inexplicit there? It’s absolutely clear on who is going to review the applications:
the committee. The business about sneakiness and evasiveness doesn’t even apply to the
very examples that she gives. It often doesn’t apply at all. I’m not saying that passives,
short passives, couldn’t be used that way. But in hundreds of hundreds of cases that
you find, they’re perfectly unexceptional. In hundreds and hundreds of cases, there is
no evasiveness at all in using a short passive. And in the ones that Sherry Roberts cites,
she gives a long passive to which her allegation isn’t relevant at all.
What about the charge that passives are feeble, ineffective and weak rather than bold and
muscular and strong? As a check on that, what I did was to take down my copy of the first
book by Lee Child about Jack Reacher, the tough, ruthless military policeman that keeps
breaking people’s knees and sometimes their necks, and open it at page one. And the book’s
called “Killing Floor” and it’s in first person, as narrated by Jack Reacher himself.
And the first sentence is “I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”. This is tough-guy prose
in absolutely its purest form. The way Lee Childs writes, the sentences are about this
long and they come at you like a fist hitting you between the eyes. It is ridiculous to
say that there’s something weak, ineffectual and nonmuscular about “I was arrested in
Eno’s diner”. What’s more, to replace that by an active would have been rhetorically
hopeless. Lee Child knows how to write active sentences, and he knows how to write about
violent action. And in this case, the point is that Jack Reacher has no idea who is arresting
him or why. He doesn’t know if this is the FBI, the local police, the sheriff, whatever.
He just knows he was sitting and eating his eggs and bacon, and he was suddenly arrested.
It would ruin everything to reveal in the first sentence of the book what was actually
going on. We have to find that out later. It’s just a silly claim that passives are
weak.
One more point: what about the idea that the best writers really avoid passives? That’s
implicit in all of this nonsense about how you should write in the active voice, as if
passives were some kind of poison. Who do you want to pick as a fine writer? That will
differ, I suppose, according to different people’s tastes. But HG Wells is presumably
a reasonable writer to pick. Let’s just look at the first paragraph of his book “The War of the Worlds".
It begins like this: “Noone would have believed in the last years
of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
greater than man’s… as his own. That as men busied themselves…microscope might…
drop of water.” There are just six transitive verbs in that paragraph. And 50% of them are
heads of passive clauses.
So, maybe that’s an anomaly. Suppose we took EB White himself, the coauthor of The
Elements of Style. We look at the introduction of The Elements of Style, the book that says
“write in the active voice”. The introduction that EB White wrote to the current edition
of The Elements of Style opens like this: “At the close of the First World War,
when I was a student at Cornell, I took a course called English 8.
My professor was William Strunk Jr. A textbook required for the course
was a slim volume called 'The Elements of Style', whose author was the professor himself.
The year was 1919. The book was known on the campus
in those days as 'the little book,' with the stress on the word 'little'.
It had been privately printed by the author. There are five transitive verbs
in that passage. 80% of them are in the passive.
EB White, who tells you what his professor told him, that you shouldn't use the passive voice,
is using them 80% of the opportunities he has
in the opening words of his own introduction to the book
What can we conclude here? The people telling you not to use the passive often don’t know
what they’re talking about. In fact, dozens of times I’ve spotted that they don’t
know how to tell what’s a passive and what isn’t. And the things that they say about
passive clauses are completely wrong. The grammatical description is wrong and misses
out most of the detail. They never mention the information structure restrictions on
passives. And the allegations they make about how they’re weak or evasive or whatever,
they don’t stand up to even a minute of close scrutiny. What I’m telling you is
not that you should use passives all the time; you shouldn’t do anything all the time.
I’m just saying that there is no value at all to someone who wants to write better prose
than they write at the moment in being told “Don’t use passives”. The trick, and
it’s not that easy to implement, is to use passives just when a passive is right. That’s
what you need. And there’s subtlety in learning how to write so that it sounds effective and
you get across what you want to get across. It’s not easy to write really well. But
it’s not going to get any easier when you’re told “Don’t use passives at all”, which
is a ridiculous piece of advice, especially if you’re told that by people who can’t
tell a passive from the active anyway, and whose beliefs about passive clauses are almost
entirely mistaken.