Exploring the Use of Active and Passive Voice in Writing

Show Notes

• What Writers Should Know About Passive Voice
• Writing Academy: Passive Voice
• Ignited Ink: Passive Voice
• Participle 
• Lessons From the Empty Writing of the Alchemyst
• Lessons From the Extremely Serious Writing of Malazan

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

[intro music]

Chris: The Mythcreants Podcast is being listened to by you. It’s hosted by I, Chris Winkle, and by…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And…

Wes: Wes.

Chris: Today, passive voice is being discussed. Should it be avoided by fiction writers everywhere? After this intro is heard, yes will be guessed, almost certainly.

Oren: There was an attempt to create passive voice in an introduction of Oren Ashkenazi, but he could not think of one. Thoughts to do passive voice could not be had by him.

Wes: There was slow clapping in the background from third host Wes.

Chris: So yes, this time we’re talking about passive voice, which has a very bad reputation in writing circles. So we’re going to talk about what it actually does, what it doesn’t do, when you should avoid it, or not.

Oren: Okay, I have an immediate question for the panel. All of the guides are like, your high school English teacher told you to never use passive voice. Did any of y’all’s high school English teachers actually have anything to say about passive voice? I don’t think mine ever did.

Wes: Mine didn’t say anything about it. I remember thinking back on that, and they just wanted us to like read books and write about books. They didn’t really talk about writing.

Oren: Chris, did your high school English teachers have anything to say about passive voice?

Chris: I don’t remember. I don’t remember that they did, but I feel like they were a little too focused on literature and where commas went. They were really focused on where commas went.

Oren: Yeah, if you’re listening, please comment to tell us if any of your high school English teachers actually had an opinion on passive voice, because that’s what literally every article I could find about passive voice started with.

Chris: I almost think it’s a little too advanced for what high school English teachers want. They just want to teach you proper grammar and punctuation. Going into style and what is strong style, I think is just more like college level.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t think I actually even knew what passive voice was until I started looking up resources for fiction writing, and then I found all this stuff about it. I’m like, “Okay, I guess that’s what that is.” Maybe.

Wes: Yeah, I remember in college I had a couple professors write a paper, get some feedback, and I remember one, he would cross out a line that had passive construction and just cross out and write, “Weak.” And I was like, “Okay, yes, point well made, sir, but also I’m very tired. And that’s what I did last night. Thank you very much for the passing grade. I take your ‘weak’ with pride.”

Chris: Okay, so first, what is passive voice? There are things that are obviously passive voice. And then there are things that it is just a discussion whether they are passive voice. Just to break this down a little bit: sentences often have a subject, a verb and an object. When we say, “You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast,” “you” are the subject and the verb is “are listening.” And then “the Mythcreants podcast” is the object. It’s the thing being done onto. Passive voice converts the object into the subject by adding another “to be” verb. So in this case, it would be, “The Mythcreants podcast is being listened to.”

Oren: And then you can add “by someone” at the end of it if you want to. It could be “being listened to by you” or it could just be “is being listened to.”

Chris: You don’t need to have the original subject or the actor, I would say in this case, because it gets confusing, because at this point, the object has become the subject. So I would just say the actor, whoever or whatever is doing something. You can add them back in with “by,” but you don’t have to. So, “the Mythcreants podcast is being listened to by you.” And that is usually a pretty easy test for passive voice: is whether you can add “by murderous kittens,” is one of my favorites, or whatever to it. If you either see the word “by” in there or you can add “by murderous kittens” and it makes grammatical sense, then that’s a good test of passive voice.

Oren: Yeah, those are the ones that even I can spot.

Wes: I think a good point here to make with passive voice is, yes, it has incredible use. And there is sometimes value in not describing the actor. “The Mythcreants podcast is being listened to” might land on its own and be appropriate for the context, right? “The vase was broken.” It’s a fun English construction to take an actor, take an agent out of something to draw focus elsewhere. And it’s just cool. It’s neat that we can do this.

Chris: So here’s a question, Wes: Since you mentioned “the vase was broken,” there are some situations in which I’m not sure if it’s clear whether something is passive voice or whether it’s just an adjective. For instance, this came up in discussion between the copy editors when I had a post on passive voice. If you take this sentence, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit,” the word “dressed” could be considered passive voice in a verb or could be considered an adjective, and it works either way. For instance, I could say, “he was handsome in a three-piece suit.” That works grammatically. Or I could say, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit by his tailor.” And both of those work, which I find interesting.

Wes: Yeah, if we want to just have this quick moment right away, “he was dressed in a three-piece suit.” The verb is simply “was,” “to be.” The participle is “dressed,” and participles are how we also form adjectives. We take nouns, we add “-ed” or we add “-ing,” making past and present participles respectively, and then those help provide additional modifiers to sentences. So in this case, we’re creating a predicate: “was dressed.” It’s offering you more context. And I would provide a fluid argument that it is still a passive construction. Because we can say, “he wore a three-piece suit,” for example. And that is tighter phrasing, and there’s a sense of agency there. And so it’s really that the “dressed,” that adjective right there, is less about the focus of the passive, and it’s more just the presence of the “to be” verb is, to quote that professor I had, weak phrasing. And so passive is not active, passive is weaker than active, it’s more words. Therefore, I could say there’s an argument there to just call that passive voice, because there’s a more active option.

Chris: Yes, I would… personally, I would call that passive. But it’s interesting that there… in this case, there isn’t really a distinction. They’re the same thing. But the point is that it has the effect that passive voice has, so you might as well refer to it as a passive voice, even though you could also consider that word an adjective. Then there’s the fact that we can have sentences with multiple clauses. Usually, when you look up resources on passive voice, everybody uses very simple example sentences that often have one clause or just are extremely clear-cut. But when you have really long, complex sentences with a lot of clauses, and this is very frequent in fiction, you have subordinate clauses that could also be considered passives. For instance, “he was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit.”

Oren: By murderous kittens. This was definitely my experience as I was desperately trying to find something relevant to say for this podcast. I read a bunch of other people’s guides on passive voice, and they generally reached similar conclusions to the post “What Fiction Writers Should Know About Passive Voice,” on Mythcreants by Chris Winkle. But the thing that really stood out to me about Chris’s post is that the examples were so much better because they were actual examples from fiction and not just hypothetical, really simple sentences. So I felt like I had a much better understanding of how to use it from Chris’s post.

Chris: But in this case, “he was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit,” we actually don’t have that extra “to be” verb because it’s been elided, so it’s implied. Technically, it’s still there lurking within the comma, but it’s tighter, right? It’s always better if we don’t have to include a word, especially since “to be” verbs just don’t have any flavor. So I would say that this is better, because we don’t have to add an extra word in there.

Wes: Yeah, it’s still, I think, passive phrasing, but it’s tighter, and I’m here for that.

Chris: And then, of course, we can add more clauses. “He was a small man,” comma, “dressed in a three-piece suit that had been tailor-made for him by murderous kittens.”

Wes: By murderous kittens.

Oren: Obviously, who else would do it?

Chris: So now we have, again, “he was a small man.” It’s not a particularly strong phrase, we still have a “to be” verb, but it is technically, I would call that active, even though it’s not particularly strong. But then we have two subordinate clauses that are passive: “dressed in a three-piece suit that had been tailor-made for him.” So I do think that when you have long sentences, it’s worth looking at all of your clauses and deciding whether or not they should be passive. At the same time, there’s… passive voice is de-emphasized, and clauses, depending on their placement, they may be in a placement of emphasis or de-emphasis. And so the very first clause, and also to some extent the very last clause, are the places where they’re naturally emphasized. And so passive voice has a stronger softening effect there, and it feels a little bit more natural in a clause that would normally be de-emphasized anyway.

Wes: Yeah, I think that’s a good point.

Oren: One thing that comes up in these conversations a lot is the basic take that this is similar to “show, don’t tell,” in that there are actually times when you want to use passive voice; it has its uses, similar to how there are times when you want to tell in fiction; you can’t show all the time. But even from a wordcraft perspective, I understand that authors are pulled towards telling more than they should, because telling requires fewer words, and it requires a less detailed knowledge of whatever it is you’re bringing across, and it takes less time and everything. Is there a similar effect with passive voice? Is there like a push towards passive voice that writers follow when they shouldn’t?

Chris: I think in some situations, but I haven’t actually noticed it all that much, right? Usually when it comes to various habits like telling or being overly distant in narration, they’re things that a lot of people do by default, right? And I see them very commonly. I haven’t seen that many fiction pieces where I was like, “Okay, this writer, their problem is they have a habit of putting everything in passive voice.” It might be more likely for people who have an academic background, because academia pushes a number of writing habits that I would consider not good writing habits in any other context, at least. And one of them is some parts of academia use a lot of passive voice.

Wes: I think it’s appropriate for that medium as well, because if you’re writing an academic subject, you might be talking about an object that doesn’t really have the ability to be active, and therefore you are almost forced to use certain constructions. A good example of this, and therefore making it a useful tool for a writer, it doesn’t translate to fiction. I’m going to be very clear about that. But if you’re talking about a film and you want to keep the film as the subject for your sentence, in describing that film, you might mention, like, the actors, the producer, the publication, the launch date, all of that stuff. If you were constantly changing your subjects to keep active phrasing, it would confuse people to no end. But if you kept it all as the film as the subject of each sentence, you’re introducing passive phrasing, but at least… it might be wordier, but you’re going to reduce that cognitive burden by keeping the subject the same the entire time. Which I think if you’re doing it, maybe more abstract things where there’s no active agent, it’s better for that purpose. But you’re right, Chris. The second you start venturing into fiction writing or storytelling of any kind, that habit should not follow you. You should be judicious about using it.

Oren: I definitely noticed, as I was writing notes for both this podcast and the previous and next episode, that I use passive voice a fair amount because it would feel repetitive to constantly point out who I’m talking about doing it. Like I would say in my notes something like, “this episode of Deep Space Nine was derided.” And I don’t say who did it. And the implication is that it was by fans and viewers. And it feels weird to include that every time or to say… to switch it around and be like, “fans didn’t like this episode.” I think just because I’m more interested in the episode than the fans who didn’t like it.

Wes: Yeah, definitely.

Chris: The emphasis is on the episode. The fans just aren’t important in this case, right? We don’t care about them. One thing I want to mention when it comes to habits, looking at some of the places where I had thought passages in fiction were using passive voice when maybe they shouldn’t: it really feels like the tendency comes from a desire to keep the subject of the previous sentence and create a smooth transition. This is a little bit what you were talking about, Wes, where if we change the subject all the time, it would be jarring. At the same time, in these cases, it feels a little unnecessary. For instance, this is one I brought up in my post: “The stone walls provided the family with only one room. It was dominated by the large table in the center.” And in this case, what we have is: we mention a room, right? And then “it,” in the next sentence, refers to the room. Only one room: “it was.” And that creates a smooth transition to the next sentence. But then, when we look at the content of the next sentence, “it was dominated by the large table,” that’s a little awkward because this large table is supposed to be dominating. And it feels so much more dominating if you change it to the subject and say, “a large table dominated the center.” It feels more dominating. And so overall, I think, when it comes to creating the right impression, that using passive voice there was not the correct choice. At the same time, I can see the impulse to create a smooth transition. And sometimes writers do create too much of a jump between sentences. It’s not clear how the second sentence is connected to the first. It’s disorienting for the reader. And it’s really hard to judge when you sense what’s happening yourself. So that is definitely one trend that I have seen. Another one, when it comes to places where I would not do passive voice, is that, again, we’re talking about subordinate clauses and leaving out things like the subject and eliding verbs. And if you have a really long sentence and you don’t want to start a new sentence. For instance, this is from the first book from Malazan, the Book of the Fallen series: “Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon, teeth bared in a leering grin, and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.” So… this is a sentence about a weather vane.

Wes: Oh, yeah.

Chris: It’s a very big deal, this weather vane. It’s a very big deal in this book. But we have this passive construction. And I actually think at the beginning of the sentence, it works really well because the first phrase is “monstrous and misshapen,” right? Which really creates a strong impression. We don’t really care who had cold-hammered this weather vane 100 years ago. It doesn’t matter to us.

Oren: You don’t tell me what I do and don’t care about. I really want to know the backstory of Mr. Coldhammer Smith, the smith who did cold-hammer it. I want to know. How did he make it so misshapen? I have so many questions.

Chris: It does have an official title, too. It’s called Mock’s Vane.

Wes: Mock’s Vane!

Chris: Maybe it’s Mock. Maybe Mock cold-hammered it into the form of a winged demon. We don’t know. But so we start with, “Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon.” To me, I’m perfectly… I think that’s perfectly okay, even though it’s passive, because that first “monstrous and misshapen” really kind of is very strong and has good emphasis.

Wes: That “had been” is like… also adds that sense of age to it, right? Really tosses it back like “this was shaped,” but a long time ago.

Chris: And then, when we go to the subordinate clauses here, we’ve got: “form of a winged demon,” comma, “teeth bared and a leering grin,” comma, “and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.” That’s the part where I would change it to a new sentence so we can have the weather vane be active again.

Oren: Yeah, if we’re spending so much time describing this weather vane, it might as well make more of an impression. Whether that’s a good use of our time or not is questionable, but we’re doing it, so we might as well have it be a little bit more imposing.

Chris: If we’re going to have a monstrous and misshapen weather vane that is a demon with teeth bared and a leering grin, at that point it makes more sense for it to be in an active position instead of just being tugged and buffeted helplessly. But I can see how the writer here probably just didn’t want to end the sentence and start a new one. And that’s probably how that happened.

Oren: Look, periods aren’t free, okay? Especially back when this book was being written, you had to pay an extra 50 cents every time you ended a sentence. So, you know.

Wes: Apparently commas were half off, so hey.

Oren: So my general understanding is that you are going to want less passive voice the more potentially, I don’t know, active or maybe tense a situation gets. Because the obviously silly example that Chris has in her post is: “the knife was raised.” And the knife being raised is a pretty dangerous, threatening action, and decoupling the actor from it feels extremely silly. It gives the impression that it’s like levitating up into the air.

Chris: It doesn’t make any sense.

Wes: Unless that’s the point, and it actually is. Well, whatever, I’m not going to split hairs. It’s a great example.

Oren: Yeah, I just… that’s been, I think, a decent general rule to follow is that if it’s higher tension, you’re almost certainly going to want more active voice because you’re trying to be higher tension. And if you try to use passive voice, which kind of slows things down, that’s going to… you’re going to be working at cross purposes.

Chris: Sometimes you’ll find unusual situations where passive voice changes the emphasis in a way that’s really productive for the sentence. For instance, I’ll have a couple good examples. This one we’ve talked before about the beginning of The Alchemist, which is a journal entry where this guy is just boasting.

Wes: That’s so good.

Chris: It has this sentence from it: “I was acknowledged as the greatest alchemist of all, sought after by kings and princes, by emperors and even the Pope himself.” “I was acknowledged,” that’s a passive construction, but its purpose is to brag. The purpose is to put the emphasis on “I.” The important thing is “I was acknowledged,” not the Pope or the emperors or the princes or kings; they’re unimportant.

Oren: Yeah, who cares about those guys?

Chris: And that makes perfect sense; it’s passive voice. And it actually comes off almost stronger because it’s passive voice, because it takes all of that emphasis and puts it on “I.” Here’s one that I really like from Elantris: “Then he saw his hand. What had been hidden in the shadows of his darkened room was now illuminated by the hallway’s flickering lantern.”

Oren: Spooooooky.

Wes: Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Chris: Yeah, so again, it takes the emphasis and puts it on this kind of mysterious thing and does it really well. But yeah, in most cases, passive voice is a good match for something that should be softened or de-emphasized, but you will just see situations in which it’s really good at putting emphasis on the right thing. And neither of those passages would be as good if passive voice was taken away.

Wes: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s like what Oren was talking about. You can definitely use passive voice to almost zoom out a bit to give people an easier time instead of active phrasing, active phrasing, active phrasing, active phrasing. And I think judicious use between active and passive voices can let your prose breathe a little bit, provide a kind of flow to your sentences. And these two examples you said are just really good examples of how it can expand to good effect, right? And then you could bring it back with active phrasing and kind of tighten it up if you needed to after something like that. So it’s a good tool.

Chris: Now, if you want to avoid it, because I think that a lot of times when we use passive voice, there may be a reason. If you find yourself writing a sentence in passive, it may be because, again, the subject just isn’t important. You may have a reason for doing it that you do not know consciously. But if it’s something where, “Okay, I would like this to be more active,” or you want to get rid of those “to be” verbs, my top recommendation is to just think a little bit more creatively of what could be the subject of your sentence and what actions it can take. Because something that we would consider passives can actually take actions. For instance, in this Elantris example, we’ve got a flickering lantern. The lantern could be the subject of the sentence. It’s flickering. It’s taking an action. Right? Something can shine or hang or drape or do all kinds of things. So we can usually take just about anything that we want to emphasize and find a verb for something that it’s doing, even if it’s just sitting there, and turn it into the subject without using passive voice in many cases.

Oren: Okay, so I have a few online takes that I need to run past you guys because…

Chris: Okay, let’s do it.

Oren: Okay. All right. So first of all, this one is from writeacademy.com. And its example is: “in the tumbledown house lived a little old lady.”

Chris: Wes, what is that? Because that’s just a reordering of the words.

Wes: “A little old lady lived in the tumbledown house.”

Chris: Which would… that would be normal in a sentence. It’s just that the word order has been rearranged.

Wes: Yeah, I would not call that passive.

Chris: No. Is there a name for that?

Wes: I don’t know. Yoda speak?

Oren: Okay, so that’s officially a Yoda sentence.

Chris: Yeah, it’s not… but that’s not passive voice. It’s not what passive voice is.

Oren: So here I got another site. This is “inked in…” No, “ignited in writing.” Yeah, “ignite your writing” or whatever. This one’s got a couple of takes. So first, we’ve got some example sentences that are things like, “the bathtub was overflowing with water.” That didn’t seem passive to me.

Chris: That’s not passive. No, because the bathtub can overflow, right? It’s… that’s the verb it’s doing. That’s just a… was it called a present participle? Wes, what is that?

Wes: We could say it’s a continuous verb construction. Past continuous verb construction. It’s happening now at the moment.

Chris: That’s all that is. That’s why the “to be” verb is there. Is this written by an AI by any chance?

Oren: I don’t know. It’s from 2019. So probably not. All right, so then we have the next one: “the park had been decorated with streamers.”

Wes: Yes, passive.

Chris: Yes, that’s passive.

Oren: Okay, so that that sounds passive, right? Because of the “had been”?

Chris: The park does not decorate itself with streamers. Somebody else had to do it. That has been omitted from this sentence.

Oren: The murderous kittens, obviously; they did it.

Wes: Yeah, they did it.

Oren: Okay, so then their hottest take was basically that any kind of distancing verb was passive voice. So, “Jim started to run after Fluffy, and Sarah felt sad.”

Chris: What? No, no!

Wes: That’s not passive.

Chris: No, no, you can’t just… no, you don’t just take all word clutter and call it passive. That’s not what passive means.

Wes: Yeah, that’s bad.

Chris: It’s bad and should feel bad.

Oren: From now on, all subpar wordcraft is passive voice.

Chris: This is a reminder to listeners that the wilds of the Internet can be dangerous and to stay safe.

Oren: Yeah, it’s dangerous to go alone. Take this podcast. That to me, I was like, “This is a really hot take.” Even I could tell this… something about this sounded wrong.

Chris: Didn’t you know that all bad phrasing is passive now? It’s just what we call it.

Wes: I don’t like that. Makes me mad.

Chris: Overall, I would say that passive voice is something to keep an eye on. Similar to “-ing” verbs, frankly, right? “-ing” verbs can also be overused. They can also be misused. They create often simultaneous things happening and sometimes that’s a logistical impossibility. People say that two things are happening at once that cannot happen at once. “-ing” verbs can also add a little clutter. But at the same time, they’re obviously something that is important and that we like to use for a variety and obviously a good tool, even if they can be misused and even if they can be overused and even if they can be a little cluttery sometimes. So I would think of passive voice as similar to that. Saying it’s bad or just saying that we should avoid it, to me, that’s a little bit too much. That’s too much of a strong statement.

Wes: It’s not helpful advice.

Oren: I noticed that some of these guides I was looking at phrased using passive voice as a cool rebel move. And I don’t think that’s a great way to look at it either. I think you should be looking at passive and active voice based on the utility they provide to your story and not like whether you’ll look cool at the writers bar. With that, I think the podcast is being ended.

Chris: If you would like Mythcreants to be supported, patreon.com slash Mythcreants should be visited.

Oren: I don’t know how they can’t give us money after that. I think they have a legal obligation to. Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons who use active and passive voice in precisely the right amounts. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Next week, you will be spoken to by us.

This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.