Understanding Passive vs. Active Voice (And Why BOTH Are Tools in Your Toolbox)

In college, I had a political science professor who had a total ban against passive voice. Any time you used passive voice, she docked a point from your assignment. Most assignments were worth 10 points, meaning you lost a whopping 10% of your grade for each passive sentence.

While this tactic was successful in beating the passive voice out of students, it also led to some fantastically awkward sentences, because there is a time and place for passive voice.

That being said, active voice is usually the best choice. It’s your trusted screwdriver that serves you well on nearly every job. But sometimes, you’ll be faced with an unusual situation, and you’ll need to grab your passive-voice hex wrench.

What's active voice and why should I use it?

Active voice is when the subject of the sentence is the one performing the action:

• “The boy threw the ball.”
• “I like writing.”

The boy was the actor who performed the action of throwing.

What’s passive voice?

It’s the opposite: when the verb acts upon the subject. The actor is either unstated or stated in a prepositional phrase:

• “The ball was thrown.” / “The ball was thrown by the boy.”
• “Writing is liked by me.” (Yuck!)

Note that passive voice always has a “to be” verb (“was” or “is” in the above examples) and a second verb (a past participle).

However, hunting out “to be” verbs should not be how you identify passive voice. Focus on who is doing the action because that “to be” verb may steer you wrong (as I’ll dig into later).

When to break the ban on passive voice

“Rules are made to be broken!”

That’s passive voice. So it is “bad”? Let’s make it active: “People made rules to be broken.”

Does that sound better to your ears? It sounds clunky to me. Why didn’t active voice improve this sentence?

Because we’re generalizing. We don’t really know or care who made these rules, so adding it into the sentence detracts from our point. Making this sentence active added words we don’t need, and it shifted the attention away from the rules to the people who made the rules—which is not our real focus.

Hence, there are some cases where passive voice is the right choice:

• When we don’t want to place blame: “The cells were contaminated, so we need to rerun the experiment.” We don’t need to tell everyone Steve contaminated the cells.
• When the actor is unknown or unimportant: “These shoes were made in Canada.” We don’t know or care who in Canada made the shoes.
• When we want to keep the emphasis on the person/thing acted upon: “The patient was stabbed three times.” We don’t care who did it. We’re focused on saving the patient!

Be specific and brief

The real problem is passive voice is vague (and long), but you can be vague and long in active voice too, e.g., “Studies show X and Y.” What studies? Who did these studies? It’s active but useless.

When we say to use active voice, really what we want to say is “Be specific and brief.” Using active voice is a concrete and effective step to accomplishing that goal, but it’s not the only way or always the best way (even if it often is).

What isn’t passive voice?

I’ve seen a lot of people (in real life and on social media) have the same misunderstanding about passive voice: They think it’s perfect-present tense.

Perfect present is easy to identify because it always uses the auxiliary verb “have/has” followed by a simple past verb, e.g., “I have worked at the lab for seven years.”

Perfect present tense is primarily used for an action that started in the past and continues to the present or was completed in the past but still has recent or ongoing effects. Hence, the above sentence implies I’m still working at the lab, whereas dropping the “have” (“I worked at the lab for seven years”) suggests I no longer work there. Note that both sentences are active.

However, this example construction is not what trips people up in identifying passive vs. active. The challenge seems to come when there is a past participle of the verb “to be” before the main verb, e.g., “I have been working on this article for a long time.”

That’s still active voice in the perfect-present tense.

How do we know it’s active?

The subject (“I”) is doing the action (“working”).

So why is this sometimes confused with passive voice?

It’s because it fits the point discussed above (that “to be” verb [“been”] + main verb [“working”]). However, in this case the main verb is a present participle, whereas in passive voice, the verb is a past participle.

Hence, the “have been” construction can be passive by using a past participle: “I have been told not to use passive voice.” In this case, the subject (“I”) is not doing the action (“told”).

We can make this sentence active: “Countless teachers have told me not to use passive voice.” This sentence is stronger. The “countless teacher” adds depth and clarity to the first vague sentence.

Conclusion

Use active voice, unless you have a specific reason for using passive voice, then use passive voice.