“Avoid the passive voice!,” writers are often told. That’s good advice — but it shouldn’t, I think, be taken to extremes.
Passive voice is bad for three reasons: (1) It tends to be less engaging, (2) it usually adds a few more words and some extra grammatical complexity, and (3) it tends to obscure who’s actually doing something. “The dog was bitten by the man” is an example of passive voice bringing less verve, and requiring more words, than the active. “Mistakes were made” is the cliche example of passive voice as obfuscation or barrier to analysis.
But sometimes passive voice is just fine, especially when you want to focus on the object of the action rather than on the actor. Here’s an example I ran across a while back: A draft said:
Neither we nor the government need sit idle when evil ideas are spread.
Someone suggested that it be changed (more or less) to:
Neither we nor the government need sit idle when people or groups spread evil ideas.
The original was in the active voice, but the “when” clause was in the passive. The replacement is entirely in the active.
But is the new version really better? It’s actually a bit longer and more complex, because it adds a reference to the actor. The addition isn’t just a single word, but the phrase “people or groups.” The new phrase is relatively bloodless, and I suspect somewhat less vivid than “evil ideas.”
More importantly, the new phrase needlessly shifts the reader’s focus from the substantively important noun phrase — the “evil ideas,” which are the reason that we must act rather than sitting idle — to the less significant “people or groups” that spread the ideas.
Now maybe there’s some other value to the edit that I’m missing. But I do think that the partly passive original is more effective than the wholly active replacement.
UPDATE: An interesting item on passive voice in technical documentation.
Comments are closed.