THE COWARD’S COP-OUT: Abuse of the passive voice

Cowards often hide behind the passive voice.

      When I teach writing seminars to people in the corporate or government  arenas, I give them one piece of simple advice that I guarantee will improve their writing about 15%, instantly: Turn most passive-voice verbs into active-voice verbs.

       According to the grammar books, in a sentence using the passive voice, the subject “receives” the action of the verb, whereas in a sentence using the active voice, the subject performs the action. That explanation doesn’t mean much, does it? Specific examples (my favorite things!) will explain the idea better. The following sentences use the passive voice:

PASSIVE-VOICE SENTENCES

That child is being abused.

The decision has already been made.

We were badly burnt by the sun.

The storeroom was left unlocked.

The vase will be fixed with glue before it is seen.

Mistakes were made.

The village has been pacified.

The library is being liberated as we speak.

Fifty employees will be given news of their future next week.

Here is what those sentences might read like if they were more honest—and in the active voice:

ACTIVE-VOICE SENTENCES

That mother is abusing her child.

The CEO has already decided that.
We burned ourselves in the sun.

I left the storeroom unlocked.

I’ll fix the vase before Mom sees it.

The President and his chief of staff committed crimes.

We bombed the village until nothing breathed there anymore.

We are burning books and breaking windows in the library.

We will fire fifty employees next week.

[Please note: “Active” and “passive” have nothing to do with verb tense. You can have passive-voice verbs in the present tense, the past tense, the future tense, and all the other tenses.]

      Look back at the examples of sentences. Honesty aside, the active-voice sentences are better stylistically: more muscular, more informative, often more concise. They are also this: Less cowardly.

Washington didn't say, "A cherry tree was chopped down."

     Here’s a true story from a corporate seminar I once gave:

     I had been hired by a huge international shipping company to teach a writing seminar. (To protect the innocent, I won’t name it. I’ll just say it rhymes with “Fred Flex,” so I’ll call it that here.) Fred Flex Inc. is a nice company and gives lots of money to charities and nonprofits each year. In fact, it had a department, the Social Responsibility Department, that comprised about twelve people whose sole job was to read requests from charities, evaluate them, and advise the CEO of the company about how much money the company should donate to each one. The CEO wasn’t happy with the way the department wrote its recommendations. That’s why he hired me.

      Before the seminar, I read some of the department’s recommendation reports. Here’s a sample final sentence from one of them:

“It is recommended that the amount that has been requested be given to the organization in question.”

     I pointed out to the twelve people in the seminar, who were sitting around a big conference table, that the sentence contained three passive-voice verbs: “is recommended,” “has been requested” and “be given.” We then tried out ways to put the verbs in the active voice and make the sentence more informative. [Teachers: Have your students try it.]

     Here’s the sentence after we made the verbs active and added specifics:

“We recommend that Fred Flex Inc. give $30,000 to the Special Olympics.”

     I told my twelve corporate students that I thought that that sentence was much better: more concise, more informative, more energetic in its choice of verbs. Yes, better in every way.

     I was met with silence. My students, all midlevel or higher corporate managers, looked uncomfortably at each other, shifting in their seats around the table. Finally, one woman raised her hand meekly. “Can we do that?!” she said, her voice full of actual fear.

     As it turned out, the people in that room felt that the revised sentence was too clear, too direct, almost too pushy. In a sense, they thought it was too brave. Part of the problem for them was the addition of specifics (naming both the giving and receiving organization, naming the dollar figure), but just as much of a problem for them was the active-voice verbs, which forced them to name who was making the recommendation.

     At that point, I reminded them that Mr. Fred, the company's CEO and their boss, was paying them for their recommendation, and yet the passive-voice sentence did everything it could to hide that recommendation and to hide who was giving it. The passive-voice sentence, I told them, was a classic corporate cop-out. It was a sentence made by fear.

     In their next set of reports to the CEO, these good folks took my advice: they replaced most of their passive-voice verbs with active-voice verbs. Thank heaven, the CEO approved. “Bravo, Zulu!” he wrote on their reports. That’s apparently Air Force talk for “Well done!” Whew. Mr. Fred hired me to give a few other writing workshops after that.

The vase has been broken. Whodunnit?

     I’ll say it again: Those who use passive-voice verbs when active-voice verbs would be better are often cowards. In the corporate world and in the world of politics and government, the passive voice is often used to avoid taking or assigning responsibility. Look again at the examples of poor sentences at the beginning of this post:

That child is being abused. (But I can't bring myself to accuse another mother outright.)

The decision has been made. (But maybe it was a bad decision, or you disagree with it, so let’s not say who made it.)

We were burnt by the sun. (It’s the sun’s fault!)

The storeroom was left unlocked. (I’m not saying I did it! Maybe it unlocked itself!)

The vase will be fixed by glue before it is seen. (I’m not saying who will fix it because I don’t want to admit I did it, and I don’t even want to think of Mom seeing it.)

Mistakes were made. (But I don’t want anybody pointing fingers at us! The mistakes maybe, somehow, perhaps, uh, got made by themselves!)

The village has been pacified. (Not only am I abusing the word “pacified,” I really don’t want our pilots having to think about what they’ve done.)

The library has been liberated. (“Liberated” sounds so much better than “breaking and burning,” but just in case you figure out what it means, we're running away now!)

Fifty employees will be given news of their future. (What news? What poor sucker will have to fire them? Maybe some other company will take responsibility!)

     The active voice forces you to name who did what. That makes for more honest, informative writing—writing that is not afraid to assign responsibility.

The cat has been cat-napped!

     If the passive voice is so bad, then, why do we have it at all? Because it can come in handy in sentences like this:

“When I got home from work, my front door had been kicked in, my television had been stolen, and my cats had been cat-napped.”

     Notice the passive-voice verbs here. I’ll bet you can figure out why. That’s right: We use the passive voice properly when we don’t know who did something, or when the result is more important than the doer. Note that we could put the sentence in the active voice: “Someone kicked in my front door, stole my television, and cat-napped my cats.” Is that sentence better? No, neither better nor worse—just different. It just emphasizes who did it rather than what was done. Which sentence you use depends on which emphasis you want to have.

     Realistically, in the world of government and corporations, there are, yes, times when you do want to avoid naming who committed an action, especially if they made a mistake. You might want to protect someone from the boss’s wrath, to avoid confrontation with a colleague, to emphasize looking for a solution rather than the cause of a problem. Sometimes (rarely) you use the passive voice just to provide sentence variety.

      But more often than not, the passive voice is a cop-out.  It is the last refuge of cowards. The active voice is usually better.

Brave writers assert their verbs; they don't cower behind the passive voice.