Let's read something sensible about the passive voice and passive constructions

[ritaxis]

At one time I was in a writing group which consisted of very nice people who wrote very nice things. Somehow it depressed me, and I nearly gave up for good during that experience. I don't know why, but it has made me shy of writing groups ever since.

But there was a thing that happened. One evening one of the very nice people in my group said I was using the passive too much. I was all earts, because I am always looking for ways to tame my writing quirks. But none of the examples he pulled out were passives. I was just floored. He was an educated person whose own writing was really wonderful. Then I was floored all over again when the rest of the group pretty much agreed with him, including two very accomplished published writers. Mostly he pulled out every use of the verb "to be" and called it a passive, no matter what the verb was actually doing. But there were other bad examples as well.

I decided that he was therefore probably objecting to something that was not in the grammar, some passive quality of the story. So there was something ineffable wrong with the story (this is how I think). And he was unable to articulate it, so he blamed it on a grammar bugaboo.

Anyway, here's Geoff Pullum's article on the passive voice, what it is, what it isn't, and all its glories. I strongly recommend you read it before you get swept up in another passive voiice argument.

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Sounds like passive aggression to me.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Hugs, my very dear -- you don't write passively, judging just by what you post.

I have so MANY BAD HABITUAL writing tropes, I can't even numerate them. It takes one revision / rewrite after another, many, many, many, to eliminate them -- and then other eyes to eliminate the rest.

This isn't taking into account all the other bad writing habits I have, including the worst adverbs, all needing to be eliminated as well.

That's what this LJ and the other blogs, and then my Real Non-public Journaling are for: to start the process of cleaning up the overt mess my writing is, to begin digging into what hopefully is a core of sense and sensibility worth building out.

Well, that's one way to describe the writing process that ALL of us go through -- with the exception of some exceptional writers, and there are exceptional writers out there. The important thing is that I recognize I'm not one of them.

Love, C.

[pameladean]

These grammatical misapprehensions are very widespread, and extremely difficult to argue people out of. Grammar checkers regularly make the same mistakes, but you would think a real live native speaker of English would be better able to make distinctions of this nature than a computer program.

I think the way you do about such remarks about my writing; but in all earnest, some of these obsessions really do exist entirely in the mind of the unfortunate reader who is afflicted with them, and can prevent good reading once the reaction to them is triggered.

And nyah nyah, passive haters, there is a real use of the passive voice AND I DID IT ON PURPOSE.

P.

[frogs_of_war]

Maybe they thought the opposite of active verbs were passive. I've heard action verbs referred to as active. Inactive, not passive is possibly what they were looking for.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

For me, passive voice is a bit like clichés. Everyone agrees that they are so bad that only the very best writers ever use them.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that very useful article. I haven't read it all, but I did read enough to see that it explains why certain constructions -- that a native speaker of English intuitively knows are wrong -- are in fact incorrect due to subtle grammatical rules. I have saved the article for future reference.

[ellarien]

Interesting article -- thank you for sharing it!

I've long been bugged by the ubiquitous, simplistic advice to avoid "passive writing" that often seems to be promulated by people who don't really know what the passive voice is. There's a common assumption that any sentence containing a form of the verb "to be" is passive. I came across something a few months ago that suggested that a lot of the confusion arose from misunderstanding of poorly-chosen examples in Strunk&White, but the article goes into it in much more depth than I could.

Of course, in some scientific circles passive voice is more or less required, though even there it seems to be going out of fashion in favour of the "royal we." I certainly don't try to enforce it when I'm marking up article manuscripts.

[(Anonymous)]

I suspect that sometimes you had people objecting to something else that bothered them about your writing, and sometimes it was a programmed-in twitch, like people objecting to split infinitives even though they can't find any rewrite that is neither genuinely awkward nor confusing.

One useful thing I did some years ago was to read a nineteenth-century style/usage guide, which was written in the same sort of way as Fowler's Modern English Usage. That set of stuff that he was sure good writer would want to use, which had been considered unexceptional before I was born—things like "fix" to mean "repair" rather than "attach"—was a useful reminder that language changes and that even a good written style guide is going to be out of date on some things by the time I read it.

[redbird]

I suspect that sometimes you had people objecting to something else that bothered them about your writing, and sometimes it was a programmed-in twitch, like people objecting to split infinitives even though they can't find any rewrite that is neither genuinely awkward nor confusing.

One useful thing I did some years ago was to read a nineteenth-century style/usage guide, which was written in the same sort of way as Fowler's Modern English Usage. That set of stuff that he was sure good writer would want to use, which had been considered unexceptional before I was born—things like "fix" to mean "repair" rather than "attach"—was a useful reminder that language changes and that even a good written style guide is going to be out of date on some things by the time I read it.