Many professionals tell us to write in active voice, but what does that mean? Two issues here, but we’ll get to the second definition later…after we discuss grammatical passive voice. Although some editors claim you should avoid passive voice at all costs, it is not true that it is an error. “There are legitimate uses for the passive voice,” says Paul Brians, professor of English at WSU. “If you don’t know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice,” says Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl). Apparently many writers talk about this problem without knowing what it is, thinking that any ‘to be’ verb signals passive voice, per Bryan A. Garner, yet the sentence “I am holding a book” uses ‘am’ (a form of ‘to be’) while being in active voice (the actor is the subject).
Grammar
We are going to call the person in the sentence who is doing something the Actor. (Linguists call it the Agent.) The person being done to is the Target. (Their term is Patient or Theme.) Consider:
- Amy hit Bill.
Amy is the Actor and Bill is the Target. In this case, the Actor is the subject, so this is active voice. We can trade things around, getting:
- Bill was hit by Amy.
The same thing happened, but now the Actor is the object and the Target is the subject, but the subject isn’t doing anything…he’s passive, and so is the sentence—but it can get even more passive if we leave Amy out completely: “Bill was hit.” It happened, but no one is admitting doing it.
As we saw, a clue to passive is that the subject isn’t actively doing anything, but that isn’t always bad:
- Focus on the Target
- The cookies were taken. (not the cake or pie)
- We don’t know the Actor
- The store was robbed. (police are still searching)
- Focus on the Actor
- He was killed by his own doctor. (not by his wife)
As with other style choices, over use is the real problem. Keep your passive sentences under control and no one will complain.
Passive Verbs
Now comes the second part. You may be writing in Active Voice, but are the verbs themselves active, that is, do they give your reader a sense of action? We aren’t talking about Stative and Dynamic verbs here, rather we mean wimpy or exciting verbs.
- Did your character walk across the room?
- Or did he stride, pace, stomp, sway, storm across the room?
- Did he pick up the ball?
- Or did he grab, snatch, confiscate, secure, choose it?
- How about the jewels? Were they just stolen?
- Or were they pinched, swiped, lifted, purloined, or did someone simply walk off with them?
- Did the girl cry?
- Or did she weep, sob, snivel, wail, or just whimper?
Get out your thesaurus, expand your vocabulary, and find new words with interesting connotations—see what it does to your writing!