What types of passive voice are best avoided?

My 2c: The first example isn't passive voice and the second sentence is ugly.

Not using verbs of being and the passive voice are two different animals. In your example about Janet's surprise, the second sentence isn't more active. And in the sentences "she was thinking about him" and "she thought about him", one is not "more active." The meanings are subtly different--the "was thinking" is called the past progressive tense, and is what you would use in a sentence like, "She was thinking about him when the phone rang." It's a perfectly good, useful structure when utilized correctly.

There's a place for all of these forms in good writing; the key is to know when to use which one, and how to use them effectively. Sometimes using a passive verb structure is the best way to get across a certain shade of meaning and mood; are you going to not use it because of an arbitrary--and not very smart--rule? There are some good grammar guides out there as well as some very good websites that explain grammar and usage--check out Grammar Girl and Purdue OWL.

You can have long passives: She was murdered by the doctor. Then you can have short passives: She was murdered. Short passives are great because they allow you carry the mystery without naming who did it--she was murdered! So like anything, it's just knowing when to use it.

Past progressives are good too, but overuse them, and although they aren't passive voice, they can make the writing pretty static: She was going.. she was looking.... she was driving.... Again it's just knowing when to use it.

With the latter you have the hard to visualise 'was': if you write was in general (an abstract relational verb), a reader can't really picture it, but use 'run', they have an instant image. Then you have the repeat on the progressive form: -ing. If all the reader is seeing is: she was running, she was jumping, she was using -ing.... then all they start to see are the repeated verb phrases, not the image you're trying to create. E.g.,

Jenn was standing by the window, rubbing at her arms and looking out as white white flurries of snow blanketed the car outside. The cold was gnawing into her more and more lately

Can be rewritten as:

Jenn stood by the window. White flurries of snow blanketed the car outside, and she rubbed at her arms. The cold gnawed at her more and more lately.

It's her pov, and because she narrates about the white flurries, we already know she has to look them to do that, so you can filter out and give focus to what's being seen, over who's seeing it, and delete the 'was looking' guider.

Best way I've heard of telling if a sentence is in passive voice is if you can add "by zombies" to it (with the meaning that the zombies did the verb, not other senses of "by") then it's passive voice. If the sentence already has a "by (person/thing that did the verb)" then you know it's passive (and if you like zombies you can change it to "by zombies). I read the advice here, it came from someone's blog but I can't remember the blog to be able to credit to the person who wrote it. But it's great advice.

Whether passive voice is appropriate or not is context dependent and it's advice, not a rule. There's nothing wrong with passive voice. The advice relates to inappropriate use of passive voice which is a common error in writing. There are times when passive is not only fine, it's actually works better than active voice.

For example, if a parcel was delivered but the focus on your story means that no-one cares who delivered the parcel or you want it to be a mystery, then it's useful. For example:

A parcel had been left on the doormat.

Joe, a delivery man, had left a parcel on the doormat. (We never see or hear from Joe again in the entire story - why mention him at all? Passive voice means we don't have to distract the reader with this irrelevant information.)

Andrea had left a parcel on the doormat, but Jack didn't have any idea that it was her. He just found the parcel and wondered who could've left it there. (A rather convoluted way of saying it and if you wanted to keep things mysterious you just killed the vibe.)


Also, you can use passive voice to make readers sympathise with a character who's had a bad thing happen to them. For example:

The car hit the boy. (The focus of the sentence is more on the car than the boy.)
The boy was hit by the car. (The focus of the sentence is more on the boy than the car.)

This can help you stay in the point of view of your main character.


When passive voice is less appropriate:

At my day job, we're told not to use passive voice in communications with customers because it sounds too stuffy and formal, for example:

"Your application is being processed." (Hopefully by professional, dedicated administrators and not zombies! But it's a very impersonal way of saying it.)
"We're processing your application." (This sounds more personal and friendly.)

Some companies may prefer the former because they consider it to sound more professional. It's not incorrect or bad to use the passive voice here. It's just an example of why people may advise against using it.


Use of passive voice can lead to awkward sentences:

Jack sat on the sofa.
The sofa was sat on by Jack. (Awkward... unless you're telling the story from the point of view of the sofa!)


It can be an indication that your MC isn't doing anything and is just having stuff happen to them:

Alice was struck by a falling piano. Alice was eaten by a shark. Alice was tied to rail tracks and was made to feel terrified as the train approached (that one is also mega awkward), etc. In a good story, the MC does stuff. If the MC's doing stuff, you'll be using the active voice.

This is the point where people get confused by terminology. Often the advice is actually "don't have a passive MC" but it gets interpreted as "don't use passive voice" - a passive MC and passive voice are two different things.

A falling piano struck Alice as she was walking to work. Luckily, it missed her head. Last week, a shark tried to eat her and it was only because a man in a passing dingy pulled her into the dingy that she wasn't harmed. The week before that, a serial killer tied her to the train tracks and she was terrified that the next train would run her over. Thankfully, a passer by called the emergency services and they stopped all the trains.

All the above is in active voice (apart from "she was terrified" but it would be ultra mega awkward to put that in active voice), but Alice still isn't doing anything and is just having random stuff happen to her. Passive MC, active voice.


Hope that helps. To sum up, there is absolutely nothing wrong at all with appropriate use of passive voice.

Also, avoid like the plague any advice that tells you NEVER use a particular kind of sentence/word. That's a red flag that helpful advice has been taken out of context and applied universally. Look for advice that's delivered alongside explanations regarding when something's a bad idea and how to use it appropriately.

Patty said:

I've heard the advice to write in active voice not passive voice. (but the advice has never been satisfactorily explained.)

Sometimes the advice is explained as: Avoid verbs of being.

Help!

I understand the sentence "She was thinking about him" may be better as "She thought about him" (Or maybe not.) 'She thought' is more active than 'she was thinking.'

I could rewrite the sentence: "Janet was surprised how calm her voice sounded" as "It surprised Janet that her voice sounded calm." I have no idea if the second is objectively superior because I have changed the subject so that the verb is active. ??

I can use help and thoughts about active/passive voice. I've been writing 'by ear.' I'm now looking for the details that may bump up the writing.

Some readers don't flag my writing as passive, but my background is academic and I probably use passive as a matter of training. One person mentions it regularly to me.

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Uh, no. Firstly the advice the avoiding passive voice is often weighed down by loads of bunkum and secondly, everything in moderation.

"She was thinking about him" is active phrasing, past continuous tense.

"She thought about him" is active phrasing, past simple tense.

"About him she was thinking" is passive phrasing, past continuous tense.

"About him she thought" is passive phrasing, past simple tense.



The tenses in question relate to when the event occurred. Past continuous reflects something ongoing and past simple just indicates something has occurred (less specific). The former is used for time manipulation in the text and doesn't have any bearing by default on being passive.

Patty said:

Some readers don't flag my writing as passive, but my background is academic and I probably use passive as a matter of training. One person mentions it regularly to me.

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... which reminds me.. my background is in science, where you have to use passive voice, for example:

50mg of the substrate was removed and placed in a petri dish.

versus

Jack removed 50mg of the substrate and Jane tried to put it in the petri dish but managed to contaminate it because she wasn't being careful so we had to start the experiment again.

The difference between sounding like a proper scientist and sounding like a year 7 student

What's appropriate for a scientific journal isn't the same as what's usually appropriate for fiction (you can't write most stories that way), but there may be times in fiction where you want to go for that vibe and it could work extremely well. Like if you're in the POV of a cold, calculating serial killer doing something totally messed up to their victims...

My apologies!

Part of this confusion is the use of the word "passive" in itself. Yes, there is a specific grammatical meaning to the term "passive voice", as has been indicated by several posters in this thread. But the term also gets used in a less formal sense sometimes, to refer to phrasing and sentences that would better be called "weak" writing. The latter is a style issue, not a grammar issue. You can write sentences that are grammatically perfect, and are still terrible writing from a style standpoint.

caw

On the subject of passive voice, has anyone used Hemingway App? It's free, and supposed to detect instances of the passive voice in documents. I've seen it mentioned in places but I haven't tried it out yet. I suspect it's one of those things you might have to take with a whole bag of salt.

Fallen said:

You can have long passives: She was murdered by the doctor. Then you can have short passives: She was murdered. Short passives are great because they allow you carry the mystery without naming who did it--she was murdered! So like anything, it's just knowing when to use it.

Past progressives are good too, but overuse them, and although they aren't passive voice, they can make the writing pretty static: She was going.. she was looking.... she was driving.... Again it's just knowing when to use it.

With the latter you have the hard to visualise 'was': if you write was in general (an abstract relational verb), a reader can't really picture it, but use 'run', they have an instant image. Then you have the repeat on the progressive form: -ing. If all the reader is seeing is: she was running, she was jumping, she was using -ing.... then all they start to see are the repeated verb phrases, not the image you're trying to create. E.g.,

Jenn was standing by the window, rubbing at her arms and looking out as white white flurries of snow blanketed the car outside. The cold was gnawing into her more and more lately

Can be rewritten as:

Jenn stood by the window. White flurries of snow blanketed the car outside, and she rubbed at her arms. The cold gnawed at her more and more lately.

It's her pov, and because she narrates about the white flurries, we already know she has to look them to do that, so you can filter out and give focus to what's being seen, over who's seeing it, and delete the 'was looking' guider.

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Past tense and passive voice are not the same thing.

"Avoid the passive voice" is one of those bits of writing advice that frequently gets taken too far, IMO. Like everything else--adverbs, dialogue tags, flat characters, exposition, etc.--it's situational. If it sounds right, chances are it works, and every writing "rule" has at least one situation where it makes sense to break it.

Stephen King had good intentions when he railed against the passive voice in On Writing, but a lot of his examples in that section are so ludicrous it's hard to imagine anyone actually writing them. What native English speaker is going to think "My first kiss will always be remembered by be" sounds natural?

While most uses of passive voice use "to be" verbs, most uses of "to be" verbs are not passive voice.

Writing gurus often advise people to avoid passive voice and also advise people to avoid overuse of to be verb sentence constructs when others work better, but they are not the same thing.

These are examples of passive voice.

The dog was taken to the vet.

My son was bitten by a bat.

Mistakes were made.

I was thrown from horse.

He was made aware of the situation.

In all of these the subject of the sentence is the recipient of its main action.

In active sentences, you'd write something like "The bat bit the boy," or "His co-workers made him aware of the situation" or whatever. Sometimes passive voice serves a valuable purpose. If you want to emphasize that the subject was being acted upon or if you don't know who performed the action (or don't want to emphasize it), it makes sense to use it. Overuse leads to convoluted sentences that take longer to read and parse.

To be verbs have many other uses besides passive sentence constructs. For example:

He was running across the room when the bomb went off.

When I arrived at the restaurant, Tom was waiting in the bar.

The "was" plus verb in past or present tense lets the reader know that an action was being performed continuously in the past without a distinct beginning and end. They are often associated in a sentence with another action that is in simple past (or present) tense. Problems arise when people use it for actions that weren't continuous or if the construct is overused.

Also, to be verbs can be used simply to describe a state of being.

Tom was a cat.

The dog was a Rottweiler.

My neighbors are from Brazil.

etc. None of those sentences are passive voice. Problems arise, however, when someone uses a bland "to be" verb when a more evocative verb could be used instead.

Tom was much taller than the other kids vs Tom towered over the other kids. It's not always necessary or desirable, though. Some of the best opening sentences in literature contain to be verbs.

http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp

Patty said:

The line I found was something like 'the landscape was sprinkled here and there with houses' or something to that effect. I spotted it without looking (which is already progress (Unless I am wrong that this is passive, ha!))

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That example really is not passive voice, any more than writing "The house was yellow."

To answer the question posed in the title thread, the forms of passive voice to be avoided are those better replaced with an active voice construction. It's no more complicatred than that.

Seriously, somehow everybody needs to be cured of the concept that use of a "to be" verb form, especially the past tense "was", is automatically a signal of passive voice. Perhaps there's a vaccine . . .

caw

One effect of the passive voice is that it often conceals the identity of the active party. For instance:

Usually it's better not to hide the actor. But sometimes you may want to, or need to. Example: She was murdered. To make that active, you would have to say X murdered her. This shifts the focus from her, the victim, to X, the murderer. (And if X is unknown, the active version highlights that.) Depending on what you want to emphasize, the passive version may be the more appropriate in the context.

IOW, passive voice is a valid tool in the writer's kit. There may be times you're glad it's there.

The terms active and passive voice are a bit misleading, and a tad coercive. But we're stuck with them.

Active voice emphasizes the actor, the subject of the sentence. Most of the times that's what we want to do. But occasionally we want to do something else.

SV
SVO
SOV (rare in English)

Passive voice emphasizes the verb or the object (if there is one). It's useful when THAT is what we want to do.

VS
VO
VSO
VOS

OV
OS
OSV
OVS

blacbird said:

That example really is not passive voice, any more than writing "The house was yellow."

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Actually, I think it is technically passive. "Was sprinkled with" implies that the land was the recipient of the act of sprinkling.

"Houses sprinkled the landscape" would be active.

Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with the use of passive voice for something like that.

benbenberi said:

IOW, passive voice is a valid tool in the writer's kit. There may be times you're glad it's there.

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Yep, and there is nothing more maddening* than being dinged** for something you did intentionally for a specific purpose without an explanation that indicates why the critiquer thought it didn't work in this particular case.

*Still fuming, decades later, about the teacher of Freshman English who deducted points for any and all uses of passive voice, regardless of purpose or context. Maybe I didn't use it as well as I thought I did, but she refused to admit that it ever served a purpose or could be legitimately used to establish a tone, mood or emphasis.

**that was a deliberate use of passive voice, btw, because "being dinged" felt less awkward and wordy than writing "having a teacher or critiquer ding you" to me. YMMV

Roxxsmom said:

Actually, I think it is technically passive. "Was sprinkled with" implies that the land was the recipient of the act of sprinkling.

"Houses sprinkled the landscape" would be active.

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Actually, "The landscape was sprinkled with houses" and "Houses sprinkled the landscape" don't mean the same thing. The houses don't sprinkle the landscape; they are sprinkled ON the landscape.
By . . . ?

In any case, "sprinkled" is kind of a lousy verb to describe this scene, IMO.

caw