David Alastair Hayden

Do you know pas­sive voice when you see it? Can you pick up on it instantly? I won­der. Because if you’re an Amer­i­can and Eng­lish is your first lan­guage, the answer is prob­a­bly no.1 Though it’s not your fault if you don’t really know. Many times along the path between kinder­garten and grad­u­at­ing high school, in col­lege Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing courses as well, I was taught that pas­sive voice and to be verbs were essen­tially the same thing. A few books along the way may have defined it cor­rectly, but if so, this was lost on stu­dents and teach­ers. (I had at least one teacher who cer­tainly would have known the dif­fer­ence but it never came up.)

The pre­em­i­nent Amer­i­can book of all things gram­mat­i­cal and fussy, the Strunk & White, doesn’t seem to fully grasp the pas­sive voice either.2 And so many Amer­i­can Eng­lish teach­ers wor­ship this text, per­pet­u­at­ing the problem.

Now if you learned Eng­lish for­mally as a sec­ond lan­guage in a coun­try other than the U.S., you prob­a­bly learned pas­sive voice cor­rectly and the arti­cle I’m about to link to may be sort of duh to you. My apolo­gies. I first learned pas­sive voice wasn’t what I thought it was due to a blog com­ment (not on this site) by some­one who for­mally learned Eng­lish as a sec­ond language.

For­tu­nately, by that time I had already fig­ured out that there wasn’t any­thing wrong with was’s or is’s in my writ­ing. A few years back after read­ing sev­eral Rowl­ing, Gem­mell, and Moor­cock books back-to-back, it occurred to me that with their fre­quent use of was their writ­ing was tech­ni­cally bad. (Based on advice I’ve seen from teach­ers and Amer­i­can fic­tion edi­tors.) I had a good laugh, real­ized that voice and story are far more impor­tant, and over­came much that had restrained my writ­ing style. (We must all come to these points in life, in one sub­ject or another.)

This fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on Pas­sive Voice from the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina will help you fig­ure out what pas­sive voice really is. I’ve excerpted their list of pas­sive voice myths below.

Myths

1. Use of the pas­sive voice con­sti­tutes a gram­mat­i­cal error.
2. Any use of “to be” (in any form) con­sti­tutes the pas­sive voice.
3. The pas­sive voice always avoids the first per­son; if some­thing is in first per­son (“I” or “we”) it’s also in the active voice.
4. You should never use the pas­sive voice.
5. I can rely on my gram­mar checker to catch the pas­sive voice.

All of these are well explained on their site. I highly rec­om­mend it for any­one who spends any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time writing.

Don’t be mis­led like I was. Too many to be verbs may result in lack­lus­ter writ­ing that lacks action and verve, but that doesn’t mean the result is pas­sive or wrong. Pas­sive voice itself isn’t wrong when used appro­pri­ately. And trust me, too many active verbs ends up giv­ing your prose a strained and unnat­ural feel­ing, lack­ing in nat­ural rhythm and style.

Any­ways, you can be the judge of my own gram­mat­i­cal fol­lies and idio­syn­crasies in my books: Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart. Check them out and just see if you can remem­ber to pay atten­tion to gram­mar all the way through. (There’s no reward if you can. Copy­ed­i­tors need not apply.)