After such a long absence, I feel I owe you a post that will make you feel better about yourself. So this is about something you do all the time. It’s something people have been telling you is wrong, even though they do it all the time too: using the passive voice. The passive voice is a much maligned but perfectly legitimate part of the English language, and I want to help you make friends with it.

I’ve wanted to write in defence of the passive voice for a long time, but I was prompted into action by a post from Glenn at the Divine Write Copywriting Blog. Glenn points out a headline that borders on nonsensical – “Facebook Note Removes Juror from Trial” – and convincingly argues that it’s probably the result of an awkward attempt to rewrite something that started off in the passive voice.

Writers are often taught to avoid the passive voice, especially in things like headlines. Glenn refers to this as a “grammar rule”, which is the one point where I part company from him. The passive voice is a completely normal part of grammar; there’s no grammatical rule that says you shouldn’t use it.

This is a bit of a hot button for me, so I pedantically posted a comment correcting Glenn. Fortunately he took this very graciously, and we’re now Twitter buddies and everything (yes, I’ve succumbed – I’m @angusgmelb if you want to follow me). But as McKean’s Law (named after another friend of mine!) would have it, I made another mistake in my correction: I said the anti-passive thing was a “usage preference”, but it’s not really that either. What it is is a style guideline.

Grammar, usage, style: these are three different things, and the differences are important enough to insist on. That’s something I should probably save for a future post. But just to be going on with:

• A sentence can be either grammatical or ungrammatical. Therefore, grammar has “rules”. (Incidentally, this is something the so-called “prescriptive” and “descriptive” camps agree on. What they disagree on is how to decide what the rules are. If you’re under the false impression that descriptive linguists hate rules and believe that “anything goes” – or even if you’re not – please start reading Language Log immediately.)
• As for usage, word meanings evolve over time, but if we want to get along it’s a good idea not to say “up” when we mean “down”. Therefore, usage also has “rules,” but they change faster than the grammatical ones. (At least that’s my impression.)
• Style is different. Style is an aesthetic category, and aesthetics aren’t the kind of thing people reach consensus about. The most you can say is that style has guidelines. You can call these guidelines “rules” if you like, but they have no more authority than rules about what to wear with what, or what kind of knife and fork to use when. In other words, they’re the kind of rule that was made to be broken.

“Rules were made to be broken”, incidentally, is a pretty good example of a passive construction – a double passive construction, no less – that couldn’t possibly be “rewritten” in the active voice. Go on, try it.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because one thing that emerges from this whole discussion is that most people only have a vague understanding of what the passive voice actually is. So let me try to clarify.

Passive voice: what’s that then?

Let me preface this by saying I’m not a grammarian or a linguist. Like most of my generation, my education in grammar was shockingly poor, and what I’ve picked up since has been piecemeal. So I’m bound to get technicalities wrong. If there are linguists etc. reading, please let me know where I’ve made mistakes and I’ll correct them.

That said, the passive voice is a grammatical form where the subject of a sentence is the object of its main verb. In English it usually looks like this:

1 NOUN + 2 AUXILIARY VERB [some form of "to be"] + 3 PAST PARTICIPLE OF MAIN VERB [of which the noun is the object].

Doesn’t really help, does it? Let’s look at some examples:

• “(1) I (2) am being (3) followed.”
• “(1) Customers (2) are (3) reminded [to bring three forms of identification].”
• “(1) You (2) have been (3) warned.”
• “(1) Rome (2) wasn’t (3) built [in a day].”

Get the idea? Now, if you look up “passive voice” on the internet you’ll see a lot of definitions saying things like “The form in which the subject of a verb is the receiver of some action”. I may not know much about grammar but I do know this is a crap definition.

Why? Because it defines a grammatical entity in semantic terms. It tries to tell us about a way of putting words together by telling us what the result means.

Why is this bad? Well, for a start, because not every verb describes an “action” (despite what you and I learnt at school). In the sentence “Gibraltar is owned by Britain”, is Gibraltar the “recipient of an action”?

Even worse, there are plenty of sentences in the active voice in which the subject is the recipient of an action. Some examples: “I received a blow to the head”; “Some people attract a lot of unwanted attention”; “You got my money.”

So try not to think about passive constructions in terms of what they mean. That way madness lies. Think about them in terms of how they’re put together. Don’t look for recipients of actions, look for “to be” and past participles. Being clear about this will also make you less susceptible to bad advice – which brings me to my next point.

Why do people keep telling me to avoid the passive voice?

You’ll come across a lot of different reasons why the passive voice is something you should avoid, but they boil down to two basic objections, which I’ll refer to as the “political objection” and the “aesthetic objection”. The first of these is totally wrongheaded. The second, on the other hand, is kind of semi-right, but still not very useful. Let’s see why.

The political objection

The political objection to the passive voice is basically this: Passive voice is bad because it lets people evade responsibility for their actions.

That’s a lot of power to hang on a grammatical construct, so it’s worth following the chain of reasoning that leads people to this conclusion:

1. Passive constructions allow one to omit the subject of a verb. (This is true.)
2. To put the same thing another way, passive constructions allow people to suppress the agent of an action by focusing on its recipient. They tell you who something was done to (oh, alright, whom), leaving out who did it. (This is where it all starts to go wrong.)
3. Therefore, passive constructions are by definition vague about agency.
4. Therefore, passive constructions allow people responsible for bad things to be vague about their responsibility.
5. Therefore, the passive voice is a sinister Orwellian device invented to help politicians avoid accountability.
6. By implication, rephrasing all passive constructions in the active voice would force politicians to be accountable for their actions.

Now, the logic of this argument is deeply flawed at every step, but let’s talk about just two ways in which this objection to the passive voice is monumentally wrong.

First, even if you accept that passive constructions are vague about agency, this is not always an undesirable thing, still less a sinister, politically motivated avoidance tactic. I could pluck examples almost at random, but here’s one: “SEVENTY-ONE YEARS AGO, THE FIRST SAVINGS BANK IN AMERICA WAS OPENED IN THIS CITY.” Hmmm, opened by whom, exactly? Those evil bankers, what do they have to hide?

…Oh.

OK, bad example. Try this: “The first Ben and Jerry’s was opened on the campus of Dartmouth University.” People like ice cream, right? There’s no real need for the people who created Ben and Jerry’s to conceal their identities. (If that was their plan, they’re not doing a very good job.)

So. Passive voice not necessarily evil as such. But there’s a more basic problem with this objection, and that’s the idea that the passive voice is by definition vague about agency. This is simply not true.

To see why, let’s start with a classic example of “evil” passive voice usage, the Nixonian “Mistakes were made.” Passive voice, check. Vague about agency, check. (Evil, check.) Anti-passive types like to argue this vagueness would be corrected if the sentence was rewritten in the active voice as “I made mistakes” – and they’re right about that much.

But consider two other ways this sentence could be rewritten. “Mistakes were made by me” is in the passive voice, but specifies the agent. “People made mistakes” is in the active voice, but doesn’t specify the agent.

In other words, and please write this down on a sticky note, there’s no necessary correlation between the passive voice and vagueness about agency. For that matter there are sentences that don’t even have agents in them, but let’s move on because I sense boredom. The important thing is: the political objection to the passive voice is completely bogus. It’s good for people to take responsibility for their actions, but you can’t make them do this by restricting their stylistic options.

The aesthetic objection

Not everyone thinks the passive voice is morally wrong; some just think it’s ugly. Because of the whole double-verb thing, this objection goes, when you use the passive voice you end up with sentences that are wordier, weaker, less elegant. This is the objection you’ll find in classic style handbooks like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. (At least, I presume it is; I’ve never actually read Strunk and White, but this is the kind of thing Strunk and White fans are always saying.)

Now, let me be honest here. I do actually spend a fair bit of my professional time turning passive constructions into active ones. When I come across sentences like “Customers are requested to bring identification”, I’ll rewrite it as “We ask customers to bring identification.” (I’ll then lean back, squint, think for a second, and rewrite this as “Please bring identification.”)

So there’s nothing exactly wrong with the idea that sentences in the passive voice might read better when rephrased in the active voice. The problem, though, is the “might” part: there are exceptions. Lots of exceptions. Tell people to “avoid the passive voice” as a blanket rule, and they’ll end up tying themselves in the kind of knots Glenn talked about in his post.

This, then, is the kind of advice that’s only really useful for people who already know how to write, who’ve developed the inner ear that tells them when something reads as slack, awkward or weak.

How do you develop this so-called inner ear, I hear you ask? It’s a simple three-step process:

1. Read lots
2. Practice writing
3. Return to Step 1

There’s no substitute for this arduous learning process; a few rules or “tips” won’t do it for you. (The same is true for any creative process, as Merlin Mann eloquently argues in his latest post.)

As a writer, there should be many moves in your repertoire, and converting passive to active should be one of them. So should converting active to passive, although you won’t use it as often. But don’t try to “avoid the passive voice” altogether. You can overdose on sunshine, too, but that doesn’t mean you should never go outside.

I’ll go further: you couldn’t avoid the passive voice even if you tried to. Like every single person who’s ever told you to “avoid the passive voice”, you will barely get through a paragraph without using it. That’s because there are several situations in which the passive voice is actually preferable, if not mandatory. Here are just a few of them.

When to use the passive voice:

• When you don’t know the subject. “My conclusion is that Father O’Reilly was murdered by person or persons unknown.”
• When you want the object to be the focus of the sentence. “He was despised and rejected.” “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
• To signify an essential rather than accidental relationship between verb and object. “This pan is used to make crepes.” (Here, making crepes is what the pan is for; “People use this pan to make crepes” would imply that they could just as easily use it to make omelettes.)
• As a more efficient alternative to specifying “people in general” as the subject. “This painting is believed to be the work of Michelangelo.” “The universe is thought to be billions of years old.”
• And so on. (Go ahead and give other examples in the comments if you like.)

For people who skipped to the end

I want you to forget the advice to “avoid the passive voice”. Instead, here’s what I urge you to do:

1. If you’re mentioning an action, say who did it unless you have a reason not to.
2. When you’re editing your writing, make converting passive constructions to active ones one of your options.
3. Do whatever works, and ignore blanket prescriptions.