I have never been good at active vs passive voice. In high school, my teacher decided that to teach us a lesson about being judicious in our use of passive voice, he would detract one point off of our finished papers total for each passive sentence. Mine was covered in red lines. In frustration, I looked at him and blurted out “Robin, you gonna fail me?”. Eventually, the class stumbled our way through the papers and active voice was long forgotten. That is, until I had a writer ask for help identifying and minimizing her use of the passive voice in her writing at the bequest of her professor. Staring at her like a deer in headlights, I realized that I could float by no longer; I had to buckle up and learn how to work with and identify both voices.
Becoming Active
Learning the difference between active and passive voice was daunting and confusing for me. My formal grammar education was seriously lacking and all the talk of subjects, past participles and direct objects made me want to gouge my eyes out. Most embarrassingly, a sample lesson plan for grade school kids that I found on BusyTeacher still left me feeling a little lost- was it necessary to go through examples labeling the subject of each sentence and discussing the difference between the two voices? It didn’t work for me.
Instead, I strove to find a simpler way to learn and explain active and passive voice; Active and Passive Voice for Dummies, if I may. One writing center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, distilled how to differentiate the two in terms that I could grasp: passive voice is identified by a “to be” phrase, plus a past participle (a verb typically ending in “-ed” with a few exceptions). Another suggested adding “by zombies” to the end of my sentences, and if the zombies were the ones doing the action, the sentence was passive. While my newfound knowledge left me feeling powerful and like I could grapple with grammar, I was still missing a big gap; why on earth does active versus passive voice even matter, especially if it’s a stylistic choice?
I first sought answers to my question on a site called “Death to the Passive Voice”, but decided to go back to different writing centers after deciding that the author of the site was probably just a little biased. The University of Toronto and American Journal Expert were able to break down why using active or passive voice mattered; while the passive voice can sound more fancy or sophisticated, it can be very unclear at times. Furthermore, it can make sentences very unwieldy; if you can’t read a sentence out loud without stumbling, you should probably take another look at it. The passive voice is great for science papers that traditionally use it, as well as situations where the actor is unknown or irrelevant, but it can’t make up a whole paper. Simply put, it can make for a dynamic or flowery addition in a paragraph, but writers ought to use active voice a solid 85-90% of the time.
Moving Forward with Active + Passive
I still don’t like having to purposefully switch from passive to active voice; for me, it’s always been a subconscious rhetorical choice, not an active decision. However, this exercise helped me to not only be prepared to help any writers in a similar position as I was a month ago, but to begin to wade into the world of formal grammar rules. To any tutors who feel like they can’t grasp a certain concept, keep going- if I can, you can too!