I don’t have a huge problem with the “amber alert” approach – I probably use it semi-consciously myself as a reader. But if you’re talking about advice to *writers*, the difficulty is that the passive voice isn’t the only way of being vague or evasive about the agent of an action. In your example, one could write “some stakeholders were concerned…” or “the council received expressions of concern…” (and so on). Unfortunately, bureaucrats will find ways of being evasive no matter what constraints you give them!

You rightly say that the problem is insufficient information, so that’s exactly how I would frame the advice to writers – as an information issue, not a grammar issue. “Be specific about the agent of an action, unless you have a reason not to.” This covers all bases and has the additional advantages of leaving “innocent” passive-voice constructions alone.

Cheers
Angus

I totally agree with your conclusion, but not your dismissal of the “political objection.” Actually, the political objection is really a consequence of the aesthetic one.

The core of the political objection is that in aesthetically appealing sentences — concise ones, in this case — the passive voice omits the subject. Sure, you can say “mistakes were made by me”, but if you’re morally ready to say “by me” then you might as well just say “I made mistakes.”

Sure, it’s only a problem if you think it matters who made the mistakes. But the first time many of us heard this sentence, that mattered a lot. When I read the sentence “mistakes were made,” I always hear it in Ronald Reagan’s voice, because I vividly remember him using it concerning the Iran-contra scandal of 1987.

You could say that the political objection applies only to the narrow case of sentences about political mistakes, spoken by people who might be responsible for them. So let’s take a gentler but still political example. My job requires me to go a lot of local-government public meetings where people express concerns about some issue. I also read a lot of descriptions of those meetings, often written for the benefit of elected officials who will ultimately decide the issue. And a phrase I sometimes encounter is “Concerns were expressed that …” E.g. “concerns were expressed that the proposed building might cast excessive shade.”

This could be seen as a positive use of the passive, if it really doesn’t matter who expressed these concerns. But if I’m a politician making the decision about building this building, I might need to know whether there is widespread concern that the proposed building is going to shade the whole neighborhood, as opposed to one adjacent property whose owner is up in arms about it.

In this case, the passive sounds bureaucratic — trying hard not to offend — but the result is inadequate information for the decision maker. If the decision maker is on his toes, she’ll notice this, but if she’s not, she may be misled into a possibly false impression that the concern expressed was widespread.

Obviously, I think there are lots of times when the passive voice is right. I’ve used it a couple of times here. But the political objection still has teeth. People writing in a political context should still ask themselves if a passive sentence is better or clearer in active. And people reading their texts should see the passive voice as a soft alarm — an amber alert that the subject may be missing, and that you might want to wonder why.

Yeah, I found myself using passive voice *9* times in a row the other day…that was a bit much even for me

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s ok to use th passive voice occasionally, just not four times in a row in one par.

Cheers
Glenn Murray (Twitter: @divinewrite)