We have seen through the usage of active and passive voice in previous posts of this blog. In this article we would address some of the frequently asked questions on passive voice.
Let us start by recapitulating the bare essentials.
Passive voice is used to hide the essential information. Let us see the play of passive voice through various examples.
- This sentence was written yesterday. (But I have no idea who wrote it.)
The message can be even more abbreviated and obtuse:
- This sentence was written. (But by whom, when, and .…?)
Even if we include the missing information, the emphasis is deflected from the issue of who wrote the sentence because the subject of the sentence (the focus of attention) is not “who the author is”. The author (the doer) is almost parenthetical information.
- This sentence was written yesterday by one of my technical people.
- This sentence was written yesterday (by one of my technical people).
Misconceptions/FAQ
Using passive voice is grammatically incorrect:
To answer this question we would start with the definition of passive voice in a different light. A passive voice occurs when the object is superimposed on the subject of the sentence. In other words, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence i.e. mentioned or inferred in the sentence. With this definition you would have realized, how often we face the need of passive voice. Most of the times the subject is inferred but as always a deduced subject will be prone to confusion. Let’s see another example.
- Why was the road crossed by the chicken?
In the above example if you observe carefully, you can see the road is the grammatical subject. Due to this structuring the chicken here becomes the grammatical object. The more familiar way of putting this sentence why did the chicken cross the road? puts the object and the subject at their respective places. We use active verbs to represent that “doing,” whether it is crossing roads, proposing ideas, making arguments, or invading houses. You would have seen by now, how usage of passive voice is just a mere extension of saying things indirectly. It is just a stylistic issue which pertains to clarity.
Usage of “to be” makes the sentence passive:
There is a golden rule to identify passive voice.
form of “to be” + past participle = passive voice
The passive voice is much more than using a verb. It’s about representation of thoughts from clarity perspective. If you notice carefully the above formula, you would notice that identifying “to be” and a past participle would definitely make the sentence passive. But using “to be” can curtail the flow of writing and certainly make the write a lot less impactful. But you should remember “to be” does not by itself constitute the passive voice, it is occasionally necessary. Not every sentence that contains a form of “have” or “be” is passive!
We have by now looked into few of the misconceptions related to passive voice. In the next article we would look into few other FAQs.

February 6th, 2011
admin
Posted in
Tags:


