We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice–that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.” – Sydney J. Harris
Though there are occasions on which the passive voice is useful and appropriate, that is not true most of the time. And when the topic is anything political, it’s almost never correct because it’s nothing more than a means of denying responsibility, or of shifting the apparent focus of the conversation. Though I’m not going to go out of my way to use a bunch of passive-voice constructions to prove a point, I will indicate proper natural uses in today’s text with an asterisk.
For those who don’t remember their grammar that well, passive voice is the sentence form in which the subject is acted upon rather than acting; it often produces weak and awkward sentences, and is thus best avoided by those who aren’t good at such things. For example:
Active voice: I wrote this sentence.
Passive voice: This sentence was written by me.
Rather cumbersome, isn’t it? As I said above, there are times when the construction is useful; if Rasputin is the subject of a paragraph, it’s perfectly reasonable and proper to include the sentence, “He was killed by a group of boyars who felt that his influence over the Czarina threatened all of Russia.” Changing the subject from “Rasputin” to “boyars” would not only be jarring, it might even make the point more confusing. The passive voice is also quite useful when the entity which actually initiated an action is unknown: “The package was picked on Tuesday,” or “The cave-paintings were made about 16,000 years ago,” or “A flaming bag of human feces was left on the steps of the police station.” This is why the form is often used by those who wish to avoid responsibility for something*; it can make it sound as though the culprit is unknown when in fact there is little doubt of his identity. The classic political example is “Mistakes were made,” which is bureaucratese for “I made a mistake” or “My office staff made a mistake” or the like. Police reports and press releases are riddled with such constructions, especially when the cops murder someone; in the cartoon world they inhabit, guns and bullets appear to act on their own without any identifiable human agency.
Given this ability of the passive voice to shift the perception of agency, you can be sure it is heavily employed in “trafficking” propaganda*. Over and over we’re told that “girls are sold for sex”, implying that they have no active role and that the legal fiction of a minor’s inability to give consent describes an actual, factual condition of passivity. Saying that a whore “is trafficked” automatically implies the existence of a “trafficker”, some person who “did this to her” after she has been stripped of agency* through the magic of the passive voice. The neofeminist term for a whore, “prostituted woman”, embodies this concept in its very form; it’s impossible to use it without essentially stating that all sex workers are victims of some imaginary “prostitutor”. Its PC alternative, “women in prostitution”, is nearly as bad, though in this case the agency seems to be shifted to an amorphous entity called “prostitution”.
But of all passive constructions, one of the subtlest and most pervasive is the word “problematic”, which is used by prohibitionists* who want to pretend that their ban-campaigns are not only based in reality, but upon some characteristic of the thing to be banned rather than some characteristic of theirs. When a neofeminist says “porn is problematic”, she pretends that there is some issue with porn which generates problems (compare “the disease is contagious” or “this mineral is radioactive”), when the truth is that the problem resides entirely in the heads of those like her. When she says something is “problematic”, what she actually means is “I have a problem with it,” but by use of the passive voice she refocuses attention from where it belongs – her busybody psyche – to the thing she hates. This makes it seem (as in the case of the cop’s gun) that the fault lies in a thing rather than a person, and thereby changes the entire conversation.
C’mon Maggie, you know who initiated that action.
Fess up.
I know you’re right, but for the life of me I’ve never understood why the passive voice version of statements like that serve to shift the locus of responsibility.
I can’t see how, in the second version, “this sentence” is acting upon “me”.
Is it because the agent is at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning?
If so, why would that shift responsibility?
Used well, a device like that could create a kind of suspense that actually emphasises the agent – a bit like the knife coming through the door before the camera shifts to the face of the person holding it.
Is “Though written by me, this sentence sucks” the passive voice version of “Though I wrote this sentence, it sucks”?
It *feels* like it is, but I just don’t know why.
Because the passive voice avoids responsibility as well as shifting it. Take a horrible airline accident as an example. Reporters are at a press conference with the CEO of the airline. “What caused this accident?” Answer one “We made some mistakes.” Answer two “Mistakes were made.” Note that the second answer is factually correct, but does not provide any information as to who made those mistakes, or if the mistakes were made by anyone employed by the company. No admission of fault or liability. You can’t argue with it; it’s true, after all. Yes, efforts can be made to find out more information, but answers like ‘the incident is being investigated’ can shut that down as well.
Note that the passive voice is only allowed to be employed by those in authority. Try using ‘mistakes were made’ in a court when you’re being asked ‘how did this shooting happen’, and you’ll find that out real fast.
Thanks for the reply Bruce.
I think I’m pretty clear on the shifting/avoiding of agency and responsibility side of it.
What I was asking about was the specifics of the example Maggie gives.
I just can’t see why the ‘me’ in the example is not acting upon ‘This sentence’.
‘Wrote’ and ‘was written by’ seem equally active verbal constructs to me.
(Was that a passive voice sentence?)
I could cite many others of its ilk that I’m equally fuzzy about. I seem to have some sort of blind spot there. I’ve been that way since school.
What am I missing here?
The “focus” of a sentence is its subject. When the subject is doing the action, it is active voice. When the subject is acted upon, it is passive voice.
“Me” is an object pronoun, meaning it is cannot used as a subject. While the sentence “the car was crashed by me” does imply that “Me” was the one responsible for the crashing, the subject of the sentence is “the car”, and “me” is just an object in the sentence. In the sentence “I crashed the car”, “I” am the subject, and “car” is the object.
In the example you provided, the passive voice sentence has a subject of “this sentence” and the subject in the active voice sentence is “I”. If you rearranged the sentences to follow the “subject verb object” format, The sentences would read “This sentence, which sucks, was written by me” and “I wrote this sentence, it sucks”. Both sentences have the same meaning, but one focuses on the suckage of the sentence, while the other focuses on the writing of the sentence.
Thank you so much Storm Daughter.
I honestly think I get it now.
I wish my fourth form English teacher had taken as much trouble as you just did.
Aside to Maggie.
Yeah, I know, you told me that.
In “passive voice is the sentence form in which the subject is acted upon” I misread ‘subject’ as ‘the subject of action’ rather than ‘the subject of the sentence’. I suspect I’ve been making the same error for a long time.
I have a lot of difficulty communicating in words.
“I have a lot of difficulty communicating in words.”
You mean, your thoughts are crystal clear, but when expressing them in words it all comes out mangled? If so, it might be a form of dyslexia.
I don’t usually mangle what I’m trying to say (except inasmuch as my grammar is pretty second rate).
But yeah, my non-technical reading comprehension is kinda dicky. I often think I get something, then on rereading or having it explained I realise I’ve missed the point or taken a different one to that intended.
The big problem is that there just doesn’t seem to be words for some of the ‘crystal clear’ thoughts I most want to communicate. When I try allusions or metaphors no-one else seems to get it unless they knew already.
My spelling is top notch though.
I usually only get squiggly lines because spell checkers are Americanised (‘Americanized’ for you yanks).
I think its more Asperger’s than dyslexia.
Is “Though written by me, this sentence sucks” the passive voice version of “Though I wrote this sentence, it sucks”?
The verb “to suck” (in this sense) is an intransitive verb, so you can’t really make a passive construction out of it. The passive construction is when the *agent* of a transitive verb is made the object rather than the subject. Agency is what it’s all about.
With your sentence, we have the over all “Despite X, Y”. The X part has the transitive verb ‘write’, the Y part the intransitive ‘suck’, but I’m not sure the sentence as a whole can be made passive voice – it doesn’t really work the way a simple declarative sentence works. I don’t know enough grammar to name the issue.
The cop-speak version would be, “The sentence, which sucks, was written on the morning of July 11th.”
There would be no “written by me;” that would be left up to the reader to guess. The extra information (July 11th, in the morning) helps the reader not to notice the information (who wrote this sucky sentence?) which is missing.
That’s more like the Rasputin example, where there is not much difference. A construction like “it is written” would be more of the fuzzy-thinking passive.
Of course these type of people aren’t really ashamed of saying “Pimps are abducting 1000s of babies”, or “I, a woman who was gang raped by porn addicts, have a problem with the availability of porn” or “God writes”, so I’m not sure it’s that much better when they drop the passive
“Police reports and press releases are riddled with such constructions…”
“Over and over we’re told …”
Both need asterisks.
Also, ‘problematic’ may be overused, but I’m not sure that it has no place at all. In some cases, there may be some agreed-upon standards for what constitutes a problem. It’s when there isn’t one – which is often – and the various standards one might bring could differ on the question at hand – which is slightly less often but still pretty often – that you get problems.
The issue with ‘problematic’ is that it’s a way of dodging responsibility for saying what the problem actually is. “X is problematic” just means “there are a bunch of problems with X”, to which the obvious rejoinder is “Really? Name one.”
Funny that you say THAT, of all things – generally, when I hear someone say ‘problematic’, either the problems really ARE too obvious to mention, or there’s the next several minutes will be taken up with an exhaustive exploration of just what those problems are.
LOL.
The passive voice is the attitude of the Planners, who would consign all of humanity other than their wonderful selves to the status of infants or manipulated objects.
Very good article. The passive voice is especially prevalent in Spanish. A person who drops something does not say “I dropped it,” but rather “it fell.” There’s not even a good (non-awkward) way to say I dropped it.
Personally, I think the most insidious thing about the misuse of the passive voice is that it implied that when things happen, the doer is somehow less important than the thing that was done. It often is, the milk is still spilled regardless of who spilled it, but that does not absolve the doer of responsibility.
Part of the problem is technical writing, which emphasizes the passive voice in order to “keep the writer out of it, and distanced from what he/she might actually think of a product.
I don’t see how the use of passive voice in technical writing is a problem, except perhaps that it sets a poor example for non-technical writing.
Any dumbing down of language is problematic. The ideal builder would understand what he was building, what it was used for, and what it could be used for, and this would constantly inform his design and development. “Technical writing”–like marketing, medical writing, legal writing, or journalism–was created as a subset of communication in order to isolate its users from the larger process of what they’re doing.
More simply put, imagine an otherwise-intelligent engineer who designs more efficient environmental filtering systems for use in the cockpits of fighter-bomber craft. The engineer’s comparatively tiny role in butchering a hundred-K Arab kiddies is assisted by his divorce from 99% of what he is doing–and dialects are fostered by rulers in order to keep things that way. Technical writing is part of the process that insulates the engineer’s humanity from the end-result of his actions, namely, more comfortable pilots who are better able to launch missiles.
The obtuse nature of technical writing also dazzles the proletariat into thinking that scientists are speaking a language of incomprehensible brilliance, and thus, must be left alone to order society as they see fit.
(Little Eichmanns, we might say, are facilitated by the destruction of Towers of Babel.)
Well – you pay taxes to blow up Arab Kiddies and even though you’re pissed about it you don’t do anything.
If I felt like you I think I’d pick up a rifle or something. “Gasp!!! They’re killing “Arab kiddies”!!
I mean – that’s what the courageous people of history have done right? Attempt to rectify the problem? Like the underground railroad and the effort to steal Jews away from the gas chambers?
Personally – for me, I don’t have a problem with these bombs and we were writing technical journals in passive voice LONG before we got involved in any Arab wars so what’s your point?
You know, you’re right.
I was just putting the finishing touches on my home made cruise missile.
So if you’d just give me your latitude and longitude …
Because its like so courageous to murder the unsuspecting from 40,000 ft or the other side of the world.
Credit where its due though.
You’ve done something I could never do.
Not after watching Das Boot.
Not after what happened to the Kursk.
Did they ever find the Thresher?
Yeah, they did find USS Thresher, 220 miles off Cape Cod.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-t/ssn593-l.htm
“Does anyone know,
where the love of God goes,
When a good ship and crew are in peril?”
Gordon Lightfoot;”Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Thanks freegirard.
I was under the impression it had gone without a trace.
Just read the Wikipedia entry.
For some reason, ‘noble’ military deaths touch me deeply (I despise war but am from an Army family).
I’m not claustrophobic and love the ocean.
But the thought of being in a can of people when its crushed under unimaginable pressure …
The examples of courage that you’re citing are the examples used by those who currently do the blowing up. E.g., Obama would say that tales of the underground railroad and gas-chamber-avoidance are heroic. Nat Turner was more of a resister than any of the watered-down-drink fairy tales, but the latter are more useful as calls to inaction, which is why Obama can speak somberly about the Holocaust while still strangling Haiti and butchering the Congo.
Was the first technical journal written before or after, say, what we call “the crusades”? Did the chicken come before the egg? Long before the printing press or any modern technical journals, there were people trying to make language less comprehensive, and less inclusive–and that behavior was associated with conquering and pillaging different ethnic groups than Arabs.
My “point” is the strong correlation between barriers to communication and violence.
Does anyone else see the irony of the first sentence here?
In technical writing, passive voice IS often the clearer alternative. The subject of a sentence about air flow, charged particles, or equation manipulation can be both very complicated to describe but either obvious from context or nearly irrelevant, such that including it would be pure distraction.
In technical contexts, obtuse writing and simply using the passive voice are two entirely separate questions. There are other cases where the subject would be merely distracting, but they’re rarer (e.g. when time is short and something needs to be done about the problem and so you can worry about what caused it later… or if you really don’t KNOW the subject).
Nonetheless, it is routinely used in the manner described by higharka and often serves merely to make the paper incomprehensible.
You should have heard the Newcastle Uni academic on the radio today trying to explain the results of a study linking omega 3 supplements with prostate cancer to an announcer who was just trying to work out whether taking them might be dangerous.
Then the problem is the obfuscated writing. Using the passive voice when inappropriate is one way to obfuscate your writing, but that does not even begin to suggest that passive voice is generally bad. The same could be said of subordinate clauses, coordinating clauses, prepositional phrases, appositives, commas, and quotes.
You’re only half way there.
It’s the mutilation of grammar in order to achieve the passive voice that leads to the obfuscated writing.
Maybe in Spanish it would be the other way around (pure speculation here, I’m no Spanish speaker) because conversational Spanish is naturally passive.
And maybe an extremely skilled speaker of passive English wouldn’t have a problem.
Notice how passive voice constructs in English generally seem to use more words?
There’s a problem for starters.
Notice how often they ‘Germanise’ the verb to the end of the sentence?
There’s another – though presumably not for German speakers.
No, I’m all the way there. Bad style is bad style. Choosing an inappropriate voice for a sentence is bad style. Sometimes choosing passive voice forces contortion. Less often, choosing active voice forces contortion.
I’m just saying that 1) improper voice selection is in a whole toolbox of confusion, and 2) improper voice selection is not the same thing as using passive voice.
We’re converging.
I agree with everything in your last comment.
But I would add that the conventions of technical writing tend to compel the use of passive voice (you won’t get into the journal if your paper is full of “I calculated”s and “we did”s).
And, as you say, passive voice causes contortion more often than active voice.
I reckon higharka nailed the important points.
After I’ve read something in a particular style I often unconsciously start to imitate it.
I do a lot of technical reading and for a while afterwards I talk and write as if I’m autistic (which I am, slightly).
I already indicated awareness of this issue in my first comment.
People get used to writing one way, and forget to “change gears.” What you practice is what you write. If you are doing passive voice technical writing 40-hours per week, its hard to write in an active voice. I know this from experience.
After reading The Demu Trilogy, I caught myself beginning sentences with “It is that…” and “I am of…”
People look at you funny when you do that. Somehow, it doesn’t help to start talking about lobster-like aliens and girls with silver eyes.
Wow, i was going to write something saying this on the next post on problematic language on Everyday Whorephobia…i dont suppose there is any possibility of just reblogging this 🙂
You mat reblog as you please. 🙂
Just seen this, damn college work…will reblog in the morning
I frequently find myself reading your posts and think, “I could never figure out how to say that, but yes, Maggie described it perfectly.” That happened more than once in this post ;-). We watched this special on trafficking the other night. I’ve really been aware of how ridiculous it’s gotten and in every single case, the ‘trafficking’ victim was the provider, she was brainwashed, her ‘pimp’ had complete control over her except for all the time he didn’t. The pretense of just being flagrantly anti-sex, anti-prostitution, anti-fun” was barely even disguised. And while I’m going to sound like a jerk for saying this, why is every single ‘expert’ on the ‘trafficking’ some really constipated looking guy or woman who nature was very unkind to – ooops, I answered my own question
Does Yoda speak in active or passive voice? Or is he just some alien that ginks up the English language that you can’t criticize because he’ll slice you open with a light saber?
By the way – the Obama administration has elevated the construction of passive voice excuses to art form.
I’m reminded of:
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021076036_apuspoliceraidgirlkilled.html
“Weekley, charged with involuntary manslaughter, is accused of acting with gross negligence when he didn’t prevent his gun from firing during the chaos that followed the use of a “flash-bang” device.”
“…when he didn’t prevent his gun from firing…” as opposed to “…when he shot a seven-year-old….”
Precisely. It’s as though the gun rushed in firing by itself, and his role was supposed to be to prevent it doing so. That kind of thing is constant in police reports.
[…] The fourth of our posts on problematic language is reblogged from The Honest Courtesan with Kind permission of @Maggie_McNeill. You can read the original here. […]
The problematic usage of ‘problematic’ is not actually a passive, grammatically. This doesn’t invalidate your larger point, but my inner pedant couldn’t help pointing it out.
It’s used in science consciously, deliberately to excise out agency. The entire point is that it doesn’t matter who pours beaker A into solution B, the laws of nature dictate the result.
Using passive voice in situations where agency is important simply because it sounds technical is sloppy at best, dishonest at worst.
Paul is wonderfully honest. The modern passive voice has become, almost exclusively, a creature of the industrial age, conjoined to the ascendancy of scientism, whereby elites limit inquiry to those things which are presupposed to have agency. The propertization of land, animals, humans, and thoughts needed its own language, and that language was the nihilistic passive voice.
The internal contradictions of the passive voice–the disempowering of actors into objects–are not an unknowing hypocrisy, but rather, a delightful deceit. When Obama says, “Civilians were killed,” he does so with the full understanding that he (an actor) killed them (objects). The passive voice is a rhetorical smokescreen for lulling actors into believing they’re objects. The hope is that children raised on the passive voice never realize they could be actors, and seize power to create a better world.
[…] years ago I wrote “Passive Voice“, an indictment of those who use that sentence form to shift blame from the actual culprit to […]