Knowing when to use the active or passive voice is a topic that a lot of people struggle with, because it seems like such a small detail. And in reality, it is — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Depending on the genre you’re writing in, it can actually be very important.
Before we get to why explaining why, here’s a refresher on the basic grammatical structure of an English sentence written in the active voice:
Sally took the book.
In this sentence, we have a subject, which is the person or thing in the sentence, followed by the verb in the sentence, which describes the action. The book then, in this sentence, is the object, or the thing that the subject is doing the verb to.
Now here is the same sentence in the passive voice:
The book was taken.
This sentence has moved the object to the subject position, and the verb has changed to be a combination of a “to be” verb (was), and an adjective (taken). So while in the real world situation where Sally picked up a book and went somewhere with it, the object didn’t actually do anything, this sentence is attributing the action of being taken to the object.
In addition to that being nonsensical, we are now also missing one very crucial piece of information: the person or thing who actually did perform the action. This isn’t so problematic in the sentence we just looked at, but consider it in the following sentence:
The checkbook was taken from Samantha’s purse.
Now we’d really like to know who took it, but this sentence formatting doesn’t give us that information. We could easily fix the original sentence by adding to it, like this:
The book was taken by Sally.
However, in doing so, we nearly doubled the length of what is normally a four-word sentence. This is the big problem with the passive voice — the same amount of wording in the passive voice tells the reader less. Ultimately, it’s just not very effective, and it can leave out really important information!
When is it appropriate to use the passive voice?
While English papers and news articles should strive to rarely use the passive voice, there are a variety of other disciplines where its expected, particularly scientific lab reports. In such reports, the writer is often required to describe an experiment they did themselves, but using first person (I, me, we) is not allowed. So a sentence that would read like this in the active voice:
We measured the light rays’ reflections on the wall using a ruler.
Should really be written like this in a scientific report:
The light rays’ reflections on the wall were then measured using a ruler.
The Takeaway
Using the passive voice isn’t inherently wrong or grammatically incorrect; it all depends on your audience and the kind of writing you’re trying to do. If your writing for a genre such as news, which expects a lot of information in a short amount of time, then avoid it; but if you’re writing for a genre like scientific writing, that doesn’t allow for first-person voice, it may be your only option.
Happy Writing!
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