Writing Gooder: Passive vs. Active Voice

For today’s update of Writing Gooder, I thought I’d try to tackle the big kahuna: passive & active voice.  It’s often misunderstood, but knowing the difference and how to avoid passive voice will be a big benefit to your writing.

Firstly, what is passive voice?  Passive voice is not merely writing in the past tense.  Nor is avoiding passive voice just a fancy way of saying “avoid the verb to be.”  Passive voice instead has to do with clarity.  Whenever it’s unclear who is doing the action, you’re using passive voice.  It can be unclear when you put the person (or thing) doing the action at the end of the sentence, or just don’t mention the person (or thing) at all.

Lets look at some examples, shall we?  First up, passive voice:

The prickly porcupine was destroyed by Godzilla.

Okay, so at this point, you may be thinking: “What’s unclear about that?  Godzilla destroyed the prickly porcupine.”  You’re somewhat correct.  What you are doing is looking at the sentence in hindsight, and in hindsight, it seems clear.  Yet, none of the relevant information (who is doing the action, and what the action is) is shown until the end of the sentence.  This is a problem.  Another example:

The prickly porcupine was destroyed.

If the last sentence didn’t, this sentence should definitely stand out to you as passive voice.  Who destroyed the prickly porcupine!?  That’s information your reader will want to know.  One more example:

Nate’s miniature Canadian totem pole that he got in Niagara Falls has been destroyed by his prickly porcupine.

This sentence is structurally just like the first example.  I started out by describing the object, but didn’t tell you the purpose of the sentence (the prickly porcupine destroying the totem pole) until the very end.

So, how can we rewrite these sentences?  Easy.  You put the actor at the front, then the action, then the object of the action.  If you think about it, it only makes sense to write sentences this way.  Plus, they’re more interesting to read.  Observe:

Godzilla destroyed the prickly porcupine.

This fixes our first two examples.  See how it seems more action-oriented and more interesting?  Our two examples from before were yawn-fests.  Now to rewrite the third example:

Nate’s prickly porcupine destroyed his miniature Canadian totem pole that he got in Niagara Falls.

More interesting, eh?  Plus, it has the added benefit of being shorter, which is always good.

Now as I said before, passive voice is sometimes necessary.  This is true whenever we aren’t sure who the actor is, or when we don’t necessarily care who the actor is.  As an example, lets say you’re buying a car from Bartemius.  One of the things you want to ask is, “Has this car ever been in a crash?”, which is passive voice.  You don’t want to ask, “Did Bartemius crash this car?” because that’s not the purpose of your question.  Indeed, Bartemius could answer “no” to that last question as long as he never crashed the car himself.  So sometimes, passive voice is acceptable.

Hopefully, this will help you.  Remember, good sentence structure goes as follows: Actor, then Action, then the Object of the Action.  And as always, the above is just the basic rule.  There are always exceptions, but I think it’ll help you at least 90% of the time.