Martin Luther King Jr. William Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers of all time and was responsible for changing literature forever. Sometimes, just switching the subject to the beginning of your sentence will get rid of your nasty passive verb. If you want to write with greater clarity and specificity, pay special attention to weeding out the dead verbs the next time you revise a paper.
Use these four methods to eliminate almost all of them. Skip to content. Previous Previous post: What is in a thesis statement? Next Next post: How to set yourself up for writing success this school year. Overuse of the passive really is bad writing, even if certain English teachers and software programmers go too far in the other direction. The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published this very good, Creative Commons licensed write-up on what passive voice is, why it might be discouraged, and when it is "okay" to use it.
Here's the same page on the WayBack Machine, just in case the original breaks again. I agree with Peter. It can serve as a cohesion device for juggling new information usually contained in the predicate of a sentence and old information usually put into the subjecct of a sentence. Passive can also be the expected style in certain genres science. In English departments in America, professors teach stupid things like: avoid the verb 'be' I think MS Word has cravenly defaulted to the writers' memories of freshman English classes where they were tasked with writing lively personal essays.
Most defenses of passive voice focus on 1 thoughtful use of it to emphasize the most important aspect of a particular statement; 2 thoughtful use of it to vary the form of sentences in a piece of writing, to avoid a protracted series of sentences that share the same subject-verb-object order; 3 historical use of passive voice by excellent writers; 4 the recentness and presumed baselessness of criticism that grammar snipes have leveled against it.
The first three points are valid and important, I think; the fourth strikes me as being irrelevant at best. The crucial common element embedded in the first three defenses is the author's conscious and well-conceived decision to use passive voice. In my experience, such intentionality is rare. More often, an author falls into passive voice unwittingly and repeatedly in situations where doing so does nothing to supply a desirable emphasis or to promote structural variety. The sentence,.
The latter is a bit shorter than the former, and avoids relegating the actor in the sentence the FBI's Washington Field Office to a participial phrase; the result to my ear sounds crisper and cleaner. But this is all a matter of taste, I suppose, since the sentence does eventually identify the actor and attribute the action to that actor. The worst fault of passive voice is that all too often it serves to deliver action without an actor. One could argue that Reagan chose this wording because he wanted to emphasize the politically fraught concession implied by the word "mistakes"; but the formulation also has the convenient characteristic of failing to identify a source of the mistakes: The sentence identifies a result and an action, but no actor in the non—Ronald Reagan sense of the word.
Though Reagan's formulation surely represents a thoughtful and tactical use of passive voice, many instances of actorless sentences do not. Consider this extended exercise in passivity:. When the cost of proposals is born by the business side of the house, frivolous proposals are stopped, proposals are better prioritized, and what is proposed is more likely to have a true ROI to the business, reducing waste and abandoned projects. The first passive-voice element "is born" has an identified actor "the business side of the house" , but the next three "are stopped," "are prioritized," and "is proposed" do not.
A reader slogging through this sentence must either struggle to identify the unnamed actors the allocation of cost to the business side "stops" frivolous proposals, the receivers of proposals [presumably managers] "prioritize" them, and the makers of proposals [presumably lower-level staffers] "propose" them or—as is much more likely—skate over the surface of the sentence without really comprehending it.
The following reformulation of the sentence is far likelier to make sense to a reader:. Requiring the business side of the house to bear the cost of proposals discourages staffers from submitting frivolous proposals, encourages managers to give priority to the most promising suggestions, and increases the likelihood that proposals will offer a legitimate return on investment, thereby reducing waste and lowering the incidence of abandoned projects.
The revised sentence is significantly longer than the original, but that's a price I'm willing to pay if it yields a sentence that identifies who is doing what, rather than leaving that task to each reader. Finally, actorless passive voice often crops up in situations where the unnamed actor responsible for the action in a sentence is in fact the author. In these instances, obscuring the author as the source of the action promotes a sense of the objective truth of the assertion.
Thus, the wording. The passive voice is not as culturally acceptable as active in modern English writing. We prefer active sentences because they are more concrete. Passive sentences are not prefered, because we do not know who the subject is, making the whole thing more abstract. There is action, but no actor. It's as if ghosts are moving things rather than real subjects acting on objects. Using passive voice is like shirking responsibility. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is using passive voice "bad form"? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 6 months ago. Active 3 years, 5 months ago. Viewed k times. Edit : If it is ok to use passive voice, then why does MS-Word complain? Improve this question. In good writing, the passive voice should not be used too much. However, never using the passive voice is also bad writing style.
The best thing to do with the Microsoft Word grammar corrector is to turn it off. Related: Style Question: Use of "we" vs. Unless you know for certain you don't need it, don't just turn it off; use it intelligently in tandem with your own critical faculties.
However, occasionally the GPS system will tell me to make a less than ideal turn, and sometimes I don't have enough time to think about it and make it. I find this the MS grammar corrector to be of this level of usefulness. Once you configure the check for passive sentences, MS-Word will squiggly-underline in green color most instances of passive sentences as illustrated below, just like it does squiggly-underline in red color spelling mistakes.
Clarity and ease-of-comprehension are two of the most important requisites to effective communication. Active voice can facilitate effective communication. The passive voice will make up the minority of most writing, but it can be powerful and forceful. Some famous examples:. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.
King James Bible, Isaiah
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