Passively active: Word order and what it can do for you
Jul 14th, 2008 | By John Roach | Category: GrammarProblem:
You believe passive voice is a sin.
Solution:
Wrong! Passive voice can be a very powerful tool, so long as you don’t overuse it.
Passive voice is when the actor of the sentence isn’t the subject. Example:
The bill was delivered in the mail.
Who’s the actor in this sentence? Well, the unseen mailman, but he got left out, poor fellow.
The mailman delivered the bill.
What’s the difference? In the first sentence, the mailman is left out entirely. We don’t know who delivered the bill.
Anyone with children should recognize this one:
The lamp broke.
Not “I broke the lamp.” “The lamp broke.”
I’m sure that your teachers in middle and high school drove it into your heads that the passive voice is wrong. Microsoft Word’s grammar checker doesn’t help dispel this illusion either. But it is an illusion.
There is a time and a place for passive voice!
Passive is appropriate when:
- You want to emphasize the object, rather than the actor
The concert was attended by 10,000 people
- When writing scientific papers
-
The experiment was conducted by my colleagues
- and when the actor is unknown
The house was broken into.
The key thing to remember is to keep what’s most important at the beginning of the sentence; if that requires a passive construction, so be it. Passive voice is a stylistic choice, not a grammatical error.
Consider the following paragraph:
Police are investigating a car crash on Highway 1. A car was found upside down in the middle of the highway with both front doors open. No injuries have been reported.
In that paragraph, the second two sentences are passive because we don’t care who found the car or who didn’t report any injuries - we’re more interested in the car and injuries themselves. The police and the non-reporters are secondary.
So next time an English teacher or word processor tries to bully you into being more active, fight back! Be passive! Tell them you were sent by me. Well, in that case, tell them I sent you. You do have to be active some times.
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This article was written by John Roach http://prowritingtips.com John is a writer and copy editor. You can follow him on twitter at . To see more posts click here |
