Usable Words

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. read more >