Why you should avoid the passive voice

Guest post by Angelita Williams.

Grammar teachers always hound their students about the same errors. They tell their students to use proper verb subject agreements, they teach about the perils of comma splices and proper semicolon usage, and they distinguish between adverbs and gerunds like it’s the most important lesson of the English language. Proper syntax in a sentence means everything.

I would argue that the most important grammar lesson has to do with the voice of a sentence—specifically, the line between passive and active voice. Most grammarians, editors, teachers, and professors complain more about passive voice than any other grammatical “mistake,” and for good reason. If you use too much of the passive voice in your wiring, it just looks bad.

So what’s the difference between passive and active voice?

The difference between passive and active voice is a matter of, well, action. A typical sentence has a subject, and verb, and the object of the verb. In an active sentence, the subject carries out an action (the verb) onto something (the object). Consider this sentence: “Carl drove the car.” the action in the sentence is clear: Carl (the subject) carries does something to an object (he drives the car). Passive voice tells the same story, but takes some of the action out of the sentence.

In the passive voice, the same sentence would look like this: “The car was driven by Carl.” Notice the syntax of the sentence and the new feel of the story within. The sentence mentions Carl (the subject) at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning, and his actions have less weight to them. He did not drive the car; the car was driven by him. The same event occurs in both sentences, but the passive voice creates distance between the subject and the subject’s actions.

Why the active voice always looks better

So if the active and the passive voice virtually tell the same story, why does it matter if you pick one over the other? It’s a matter of asserting yourself in your writing: the passive voice suggests, well, passivity. Your writing looks weaker and less convincing when written in the passive voice. There’s a better chance that your ideas will come off as confusing if you write them in the passive voice, precisely because the subject is so far removed from the beginning of a sentence. Some writers opt for the passive voice because it pads their wiring, but that too is an insufficient reason. Ideas that you can clearly write in the active voice might have a longer word count when flipping into passive voice, but that won’t help your writing style.

What do you do to combat the passive voice in your writing?

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This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.