Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something.
Examples:
* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.
* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]
Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.
E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.
Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.
That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context)
"A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence"
Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.
That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.
Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.
Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.
> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.
I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice
Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.
I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.
absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.
Consider:
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.
This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.
Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.
(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)
Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for
ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.
You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for
ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.
This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]
It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.
But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something.
Examples:
* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.
* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]
Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.
-
edited for clarity, detail
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
The subject can also be the feature itself. active/passive:
- The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive.
- A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.
5 replies →
Then we agree.
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.
E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.
Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
6 replies →
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
14 replies →
I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...
Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.
#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.
My favourite: "a decision was made to...".
It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."
That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context)
"A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence"
Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.
That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
2 replies →
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.
Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.
Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.
> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
3 replies →
There's nothing wrong with the passive voice.
The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.
I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice
Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
What would it mean to use the passive voice on a finite verb?
1 reply →
Active is generally more concise and engages the reader more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything.
Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised before.
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.
I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.
absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.
Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing:
- Active: The user presses the Enter key.
- Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed.
- Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key.
The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.
Passive is too human. We need robot-styles communications, next step is to send json.
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.
Consider:
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.
This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.
Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.
(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)
Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.
You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.
This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
> Consider:
>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]
It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.
But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
1 reply →
I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely on the type of writing you’re doing and who your audience is.
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You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment.
Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.
Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
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You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.
"Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
2 replies →
Mistakes were made in the documentation.