Part 1. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Effacing the Subject to Showcase the Object

This is the first post of a three-part series.

The passive voice is much maligned, especially in academic writing and by academic advisors, but it has loads of perfectly defensible uses.

The passive voice is frequently misunderstood by editors, writers, academic advisors, professors—just about everyone, really. Sometimes, people flag constructions that aren’t actually passive, and other times, they insist on the active voice when the passive is more appropriate. And man, can they ever come on strong.

But here’s what they don’t know: Even though the active voice is usually the better choice, the passive isn’t just some awkward design flaw of the English language. Actually, it can be a helpful device that crafty writers and speakers use when they want their audience to focus on the object of a sentence, not the subject, for any number of perfectly valid reasons.

If you’re a writer looking to push back against excessive policing of the passive voice, it helps to put yourself through the blazing hell of knowing what the construction entails, what it doesn’t, and why you might want to use it.

In this post series, we’ll descend into that fire together, learning about subjects and objects; auxiliary verbs, principal verbs, and participle verbs; and the ever-so-nifty category of ergative verbs. We’ll also explore when you might want to use the passive voice and where you can look to find formal support for your decision.

But first, we need to tackle some terms.

The Passive Voice: What It Is

Generally, English syntax, or structure, centres subject-verb-object constructions. Subjects are the actors, verbs are the actions, and objects are either acted on (known as “direct objects”) or recipients of the thing acted on (known as “indirect objects”).

To keep things relatively sane, we’ll be using an example with just a direct object. These kinds of clauses only have one passive form, whereas clauses with indirect objects have two, and understanding them is a little harder for beginners. For now, just be mindful that indirect objects are out there, waiting to complicate your life if you ever feel like letting them in.

Here’s our example:

Timmy ate the pickle.

Here, “Timmy” is the subject of “ate,” and “the pickle” is the object. Timmy is the actor, and the pickle is being acted on. (Timmy’s been keeping a perfectly firm pickle in the front pouch of his murse, and now, after a long, hard day, he’s finally eating it while riding the bus home from work.)

The construction is active, and it’s admired for its clarity and concision. We know who did what, we know to whom or what they did it, and we don’t have to process a wordy sentence to get all the information. That’s good stuff.

In passive constructions, the syntax is flipped, with the object fronting the sentence and the subject either tailing it with a prepositional phrase or missing altogether. In the passive voice, our example becomes: “The pickle was eaten by Timmy” or “The pickle was eaten.”

Broadly speaking, both these examples are one form, the second a minimalist version of the first.

To understand what makes this construction passive, we need to hover over the verb, noting that “was eaten” is built from an auxiliary form of “to be” and the past participle of the principle verb “to eat.” What on Earth does that mean? Let’s keep hovering:

• A principal verb expresses the main event of its clause, and it can stand alone in simple tenses, as in “Timmy eats” or “Timmy ate.”

• An auxiliary verb is that little word that comes first, creating a voice or complicated tense, as in “Timmy had eaten the pickle,” “Timmy is eating the pickle,” or—incoming passive!—“The pickle was eaten.”

• Finally, a participle is a verb form that generally ends in “-ing” if it’s present tense or “-ed” if it’s past tense, but not always, as English is bursting with irregular verbs, like the one in our example. The main thing to remember is that a participle is the word that comes after the auxiliary verb and that can sometimes be used as an adjective, like in the “running man.”

  
  

Still with me? Yes, I’ve summoned a brimstone of scalding grammatical terms down on our heads, but hopefully the takeaway is clear enough: Your construction is only passive if the object (the thing being acted on or receiving the thing acted on) is positioned up front, the subject (the thing doing the action) is slotted in the back or missing entirely, and an auxiliary form of “to be” comes before a participle verb. Also, in more colloquial English, an auxiliary form of “to get” can appear in place of “to be,” as in “The pickle got eaten.”

If these features aren’t present, the passive voice isn’t either.

You might need to read this over a few times to get comfortable with the terms, but don’t sweat it. That's normal. Once you’re grounded, check out the next post in this series, which explores what the passive voice isn’t but often gets mistaken for.