We’ve already explained that sometimes there are excellent reasons to use passive voice . Let us be clear once again that the use of passive voice is NOT a grammatical error, no matter what your professor says. It is a matter of both style and clarity — there are several reasons, however, to avoid using it if at all possible.

Say what?

The number one reason you should avoid passive voice is that it can make your sentence unclear. Your reader will sometimes have a hard time understanding your meaning. In an active sentence, the meaning is clear and direct. In a passive sentence, the reader has to put more careful thought into deconstructing the words to make sense of them. For example:

Will hit the deer with his car.

This is an example of a sentence in active voice. Will is the subject and hit is the verb, and the deer is the object of the verb. Will is acting on the deer directly. The reader needs to give no further thought to this cut-and-dry sentence. However, the meaning isn’t so instinctively clear in the passive voice counterpart:

The deer was hit by Will’s car.

Granted, these are very short sentences, so even in the passive voice, the reader doesn’t have to do too much interpreting to gather the meaning. In longer, more complicated sentences, the meaning would get lost in the shuffle of subject/verb/object placement. For instance:

The decision to remove all the toilet paper holders from the second-floor bathrooms was made at yesterday’s meeting by the president of the company.

The average reader would have to read this sentence at least twice to make any sense of it. Rewriting the sentence with an active voice eliminates confusion over who did what:

The president of the company decided to remove all the toilet paper holders from the second-floor bathrooms at yesterday’s meeting.

That one only needs to be read once, and we can move on, feeling sorry for the poor second-floor employees.

Passive aggressive

Passive voice is usually just plain, well, passive. Your sentence will lose its emphasis. Weak sentences are not much fun to read. Which of these two sentences has more “oomph”?

The wife murdered her abusive husband.

or

The abusive husband was murdered by his wife.

The first sentence is active and strong. The second falls flat. The fact that she murdered her husband is present in both sentence, but it stands out much more forcefully in the first. The second sentence’s emphasis is more on the fact that he was murdered, not that she murdered him.

Whodunnit?

In passive sentences, the subject, or “actor,” of the sentence significantly loses emphasis. If we wanted to guess the perpetrator, we’d be reading crime and mystery novels. Identifying the actor of the sentence is important, particularly in scholarly writing. Sometimes writers use the passive voice and omit the subject entirely:

Before the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans were discriminated against.

Is there an actor in this sentence? If you answered “no,” you win. African-Americans are the object, and discriminated is the action being done to the object. Who’s doing the discriminating?

Before the Civil Rights Movement, whites discriminated against African-Americans.

Now we have our actor: whites. This sentence informs the reader much more than the first.

Why should we believe you?

When you are making a case or argument, using the passive voice hinders your credibility. Nothing makes a reader question your authority more than the following passive statements:

It is believed that…
It is theorized that…
It is argued that…
The characters were portrayed as…

If you’re making a point, be sure that your arguments have actors. Your reader will think that you either don’t know who believed, theorized, argued, etc., or you are too lazy to look it up. Active voice makes your argument believable and gives it authority:

Orwell believed that…
Smith theorized that…
Anthony argued that…
Weiner portrayed the character of Cannie as…

Final thoughts

While there is no grammatical error in the use of passive voice, it is usually best to avoid it. It has its place in some cases, and is preferable to active in others. However, if you want your writing to be clear, strong, and believable, you’re better off being active.

This article was written by Jennifer Roach http://jennifermroach.com Jennifer is a fiction writer, blogger, and freelance editor/proofreader. You can follow her on Twitter @jennifermroach or on MySpace . To see more posts click here

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