Passive Is As the Verb Does © by Sandy Van Doren

Back in the days before digital and online became the big things they are today, WARA had an official newsletter, mailed to members every two months.  Each newsletter included a column about the technical side of writing, otherwise known as grammar and punctuation.  Member Sandy Van Doren penned the column for each edition for many years, and it became a favorite among the members.

Recently, member Nina Sipes suggested that WARA add a blog each month containing Sandy's wisdom and instruction, so we've decided to do just that.  By taking as many of Sandy's Talking Technical columns and including them as a blog post for both new writers and those who are more seasoned, we hope this mid-month topic will become a favorite of WARA members, new and old, and our visitors.

Welcome to TALKING TECHNICAL!

As people in all professions are wont to do, we romance wordsmiths have developed and are developing a jargon of our own.  The problem is we don't respect the buzzwords we've created.  In computerese GIGO will always be garbage in, garbage out.  In romance-ese voice, for instance, is used in several different phrases.  Since I began writing romance, I've heard voice applied in the following ways:  "How do I now what my voice is?"  "Don't use passive voice."  "Whose voice is telling the story?"

The last sentence refers to the point of view character, as in which character is telling the story.  The first sentence asks about author style.  You probably figured those out like I did.  But the middle sentence is a puzzle and creates confusion.  What is passive voice?

Voice in grammar refers to the function of a verb to show whether the subject of that verb acts or is acted upon.  If the subject acts, it's called the verb's active voice.  When the action is passed back to the subject or the subject receives the results, the voice of the verb is passive.

Sentences written in passive voice usually have certain characteristics besides the subject being the receiver of the action.  A prepositional phrase with the word "by" and containing the perpetrator of the action can follow the verb.  The complete verb is usually some form of to be along with the past participle of the main verb. 

      Examples:

Classic passive voice ~ The rock song was written by a ninety-year-old woman.

Breakdown of sentence ~

The Rock [song]        [was]      [written]      [by a nintely-year-old woman].

              [Subject]     [to be]   [main verb]          [prepositional phrase]

Okay, how do you know that written is the past particple?  Do you remember the wonderful exercise from elementary school, verb congugation?  It went like this for the verb to love:  I love, I loved, I have loved.  That breaks down to the present tense, the past tense, and, you guessed it, the past participle.  (By the way, to love is the present infinitive of the verb.)  In the example the verb is to write and conjugates:  write, wrote, written.

     More examples of passive voice:

Without prepositional phrase ~

Our car was stolen yesterday.
Trash had been thrown about.
I am being shoved forward.
The table is cleaned every day.

With a prepositional phrase ~

The song would have been performed for the first time by her grandson's band.
The book will be used by adult reading classes.

Exercise your knowledge and "diagram" these two sentences as I did the first example.  Now, conjugate each main verb.  Want more practice recognizing passive voice?  Look in the newspaper, a magazine, a novel.  Or go to your current work-in-progress.

With the basics having been covered, I'm going to commit blasphemy:  Passive voice is not wrong or bad.  Strunk and White refer to passive voice as "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary."

Convenient?  Necessary?  For what?

Take two of my examples.  (1) The rock song was written by a ninety-year-old woman.  Let's switch this sentence into active voice:  A ninety-year-old woman wrote the rock song.  That works, doesn't it?

Now rework this sentence (2) Our car was stolen yesterday.  Oops, did I hear you say you can't find who stole the car?  Not knowing who acted is one reason to use passive voice.

Another time would be when the agent of the action is not important:  Jim Bob Doe was paroled.

Other instances occur when you want to emphasize or direct attention to the receiver of the action.  Trash has been thrown about.

With the foregoing pro-passive voice language I've written, you're probably wondering why some writers/editors/agents/grammar books treat passive voice as Public Enemy #1.  Their view is valid if modified by the above arguments.  Consider these sentences:

Tomatoes and strawberries were harvested by migrant workers.
Migrant workers harvested tomatoes and strawberries.
The hiring is done by the secretary.
The secretary does the hiring.

Which ones are easier to picture?  Have more vigor?  Show rather than tell?  There you have it:  Active voice is vivid and places the reader in the story better than passive voice.  Or put another way, passive voice is "action once removed" from the reader.

That might work for academia but the buyers of fiction want to be right in the middle, not one step back.

Now, I have some words of caution:  Not all to be verbs are equal.  Verbs come in two types, transitive and intransitive.  Transitive verbs transfer the action; intransitive link or indicate of passive voice.  Obviously, in all my examples the verbs are transitive.  Can you come up with a few examples of intransitive?

I'm asleep.  She is beautiful.  Here's the book.  The dog was a dirty mess.

This means not every use of a to be verb is indicative of passive voice.  In the above examples none of the subjects are acted upon, nor do they act.  They simply are.  We see them in a state of being.  We see them described.

If your word processing program has a grammar check, use it to ferret out passive voice.  Don't automatically eliminate it.  Instead, make conscious decisions to leave it when the passive voice is more appropriate to what you want to say.

Act to be passive.  It's your right, your duty, as the sentence's creator.

(Thank you, Sandy, from all your WARA friends.)

Active vs Passive, Passive vs Active - It's Enough to Make a Writer's Head Spin (Penny Rader)

I don't know about you, but the whole active vs passive thing confused me when I was a newbie writer. Sometimes I still get it a bit mixed up. I thought I'd search the 'net and see what I could find. I hope you find these links (and the included snippets from the links) helpful.

Activate Passive Narrative – Most of the Time (Ray Rhamey)

How to turn passive to active:

Search for “to be” verbs: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been, then try to turn them around. Passive sentences are constructed like this: object-verb-subject. Take the subject and put it at the front of the sentence, put the object at the end, and change the verb. For example:

Passive: My book is being read by an editor. (book = object, editor = subject)

Active: An editor is reading my book.

…Be wary of combining “to be” verbs with present participles. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything with a “was” is passive, but there are sentences that are not. And a present participle — a verb with an “ing” suffix — does not equal passive.

…My advice: search for forms of “to be” in your writing and see if you can activate or de-ing your sentences. If you’re writing in the past tense, “was” and “were” are the primary culprits. In the present tense, search for “is” and “are.”

Active Verbs vs Passive Verbs in Fiction (Sandra Haven)

Passive Structure:
The motor went dead. Sally was scared and her hands were shaking more than ever as she took her hands off the steering wheel. Her mind was racing at a dizzying speed so that all she felt was numb.

This should be a tense scene, but we have 5 passives with only took a possibly visual act – but not too exciting at that. By activating the verbs you create the tension we need:

Active Structure:
The motor died. Sally’s hands shook as she snatched them off the wheel in fear. Her mind raced at a dizzying speed as a cold numbness threatened to steal her breath.

See how much more intense this feels. We can see every action listed. The reader feels dizzy right along with Sally. We have verbs of actions we can see or feel in some way. Readers are suddenly in the story instead of being told about it.


Eliminating Passive Writing (Laura Backes)

I've read entire manuscripts written in passive sentences, which make the story sound like it's about to start, but never takes off. Passive writing tells rather than shows; the author circles the story without ever letting the reader become involved in the action.


Passive Voice (Amy Padgett)

Do not confuse verb tense with passive or active voice. Passive or active are determined strictly by the doer or recipient of the action. And, believe it or not, there are actually times when you should use passive voice.

This is one way that you can make active/passive voice work for you—and help you define your characters. A hero who is uncomfortable with emotions and likes to keep people at a distance, may prefer to say, “A bus hit Nancy.” It’s direct, impersonal, and active. Those may be your hero’s main traits.On the other hand, a hero who is emotionally connected to Nancy and focused on her and her tragedy, may say, “Nancy was hit by a bus this morning.” It reveals his focus on Nancy and the writer can use that to show his emotional “reference.”


Passive Voice Hides Your Characters (Jason Black)

Passive voice hides your characters from view.

It’s really that simple. Novels are about characters doing things. Passive voice shifts the focus of the writing away from the characters and onto the things they’re doing or the tools they're using.

…Passive voice is lazy writing because it lets you skip the hard work of figuring out how characters feel and how those feelings shape their actions. Active voice forces writers to do that work. It forces us to focus on the interesting characters of our stories and the fascinating relationships driving them.

What’s So Bad About Passive Voice? (Carmelo Martino)

…it’s not enough to avoid passive sentence constructions like “The milk was spilled by her.” (You can easily spot these constructions if you use the grammar checker in Microsoft Word.) We also need to avoid verbs that are “in effect” passive, such as forms of the verb “to be”: am, are, is, was, were, have been, had been, etc. Consider the following examples:

The room was crowded.

They were outside.

Her hair is beautiful.

Now notice how the movie in your mind changes if, instead of: The room was crowded.

We write: Patients filled the waiting room.

Or: The line of waiting passengers snaked outside the station entrance.

What if, instead of: They were outside.

We write: They paced on the front porch.

Or: They sat in the grass.

And if, instead of: Her hair is beautiful.

We write: Her auburn hair fell past her shoulders.

Or: Her golden hair glowed in the afternoon sun.

Of course, I’ve done more than change the verbs in these examples – I’ve added details to help readers visualize the scene. These details increase the probability that the movie playing in readers’ minds will match the one I saw while writing. And if the neuroscientists are right, readers won’t just “watch” the movie, they’ll live it.

~~

I hope you'll share what you know and/or have learned about Active vs Passive. If you know of additional resources, I'd love to hear about them.

Passive vs Active

As any grown up girl knows, there's a time for passive and a time for active. Each has its own pleasures and responsibilities.

In the world of relationships, someone has to have something being done to them--that's passive and the someone is the object of the action. Another has to be the one doing the action--that's the active.

Why do we have both active and passive if active is supposed to be so desirable? Because, as any grown up girl knows, all active makes for a very tired girl and is only half the fun.

Active makes the story accelerate and increases the pace. The pace is the speed of reading and comprehending. Passive makes the story decelerate and slows the pace. As the pace slows and the speed of the reading relaxes so does the brain. This slowdown allows a more contemplative feeling in the story. According to theory, optimum reading has a split in the percentages of each. Word, a program often used by writers, will keep track of this for you. All you have to do is turn on that option. The split in percentage is kept as part of the readability of an particular piece of writing. Readability is also used to determine the optimum reading level of a piece of writing for a particular audience. Readability statistics can be checked on a sentence, paragraph, or any size piece of writing.

How do you know if a writer has overdone the active portion of a story? Because you, as the reader, feel mentally breathless as if you've been running. Think back. Have you experienced that in your pleasure reading or your own editing? Think about slowing down. Let portions of the story be savored. Pacify our passion for passive.

Here's a bit of mixed. Think about what the writer intended the reader to feel.

A small whisper of sound came from the underbrush behind him.

She had followed him!

A line on his control snapped.

He swore a string of words containing all of the wild frustration he held. Sparkles danced before his eyes as he ran out of breath. He knew leaders weren’t supposed to harm the ones they led, but he could see how they could be driven to it. What kind of leader was he to get himself in this position?

He focused furiously on the puny scuff mark he’d made on the tree—determined to contain himself completely before he turned around. He knew she was behind him…keeping him in sight. He felt a heated ache blooming up the back of his neck and head to match the pounding in his temples. He was going to have to….

Passive to Active Voice Quiz Answers by J Vincent

I’ve paid much more attention to passive and active voice since I wrote the blog and this quiz. Hope it helps you too.

1. His hair was cut by a professional since it had been scorched in a fire.
A professional cut his hair since it had scorched in a fire.

2. The Doctor’s Blessing was written by Patricia Davids.
Patricia Davids wrote The Doctor’s Blessing. The original sentence puts more emphasis on Pat’s name and there is nothing wrong with that.


3. Last night the Wingnuts were told of their missing the playoffs by the manager.
Last night the manager told the Wingnuts of their missing the playoffs.

4. After all the arguing was over, the plan for the Boat House had been approved by the City Commission.
After all the arguing was over the City Commission approved the plan for the Boat House.

5. An F4 tornado hit nearby and destroyed several homes.
This sentence is already in the active voice.

6. After a bout of rough housing a foul was called by one of the refs.
One of the refs called a foul after a bout of rough housing.

7. The solution to the problem was quickly learned by the student, but it was also quickly forgotten by her.
The student quickly learned and then quickly forgot the solution to the problem.

8. Contestants in the game were asked about their qualifications to play.
There’s nothing wrong with the passive use in this sentence. Who asked the question is not particularly important.


9. For several days Robert was taken care of by his aunt.
His aunt took care of Robert for several days. The original version put more emphasis on Robert than it does his aunt and that’s okay.


10. The girl was shocked by the language in the movie.
The movie’s language shocked the girl. If you wish to emphasis that the girl was shocked as opposed to the effect itself or the source the passive is okay.