Part 2. In Praise of the Passive Voice: Effacing the Subject to Showcase the Object

This is the second post of a three-part series. The first is available here.

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

Now that you know what the passive voice is, let’s learn what it isn’t, by which I mean the stuff people sometimes flag as passive even though it’s active.

Complex Verb Tenses

First, in part one of this series, we brushed up against a few scenarios that tend to rile up some of the errant scolds who police our writing: complex verb tenses.

For example, it’s not uncommon for a prof or advisor to see an auxiliary “to be” and assume the construction is passive even though it’s actually an active present- or past-continuous verb phrase, like “Timmy is eating a pickle” or “Timmy was eating a pickle.”

This also happens with past- and present-perfect verb phrases, like “Timmy had eaten the pickle” or “Timmy has eaten the pickle,” even though these don’t feature an auxiliary “to be.”

But again, Timmy’s acting on the pickle in all these examples, so they’re incontrovertibly active.

Intro to the Ergative: Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

What can be a little harder to explain—and identify—are ergative verbs. Here, we have to open the door to the concepts of transitive and intransitive verbs, which are verbs that do and don’t take direct objects, respectively.

So we already know “to eat” is transitive because it can take a direct object like “pickle.” If we think of examples like “Rene road a bike,” “Juan read a book,” and “The cat scratched my face,” we’re probably feeling more at home with the idea.

Transitive verbs can be followed directly by a noun (e.g., “stove”), an article and a noun (e.g., “the stove”), or a possessive noun/pronoun and a noun (e.g., “dad’s stove”).

Meanwhile, an intransitive verb can’t be followed by a direct object. Examples include “I slept at home,” “I ran down the street,” and “Hank sneezed during the ceremony.”

You may notice that each of these verbs is followed by some words and a noun, but actually, all those riffs are adverbial. They’re telling us something about the verb—where the actions took place, in each of these cases.

This confusion can lead to rage, but please remain calm, asking yourself if “down the street” can be acted on like, say, a pickle. Nope. And neither can “at home” or “during the ceremony.” So no direct objects here, which means no transitive verbs either.

Ergative Verbs

Now we’re finally ready to tackle ergative verbs, which are transitive verbs that become intransitive by shifting their direct objects into the subject position while remaining active, which is wild sorcery indeed. Helpful examples include “Jerome spins the bottle” becoming “The bottle spins” or “Samantha burned the pizza” becoming “The pizza burned.”

Whereas in the passive voice, direct objects displace the subject or obscure it, in ergative constructions, they eat its heart and take on its powers of activation while still maintaining the fullness of their direct-object identity.

So why not always use them instead of passive constructions? Sadly, not that many verbs, relatively speaking, have ergative capacity. Typically, these verbs describe changes of state and movement, and we most commonly encounter them in contexts of cooking, though they crop up elsewhere too.

Like everything else, this is another sizeable topic bloated with terms and examples, but for our purposes, what counts is that these constructions are active. Why? Because there’s no auxiliary verb and no participle (even the “-ed” words aren’t participles because they aren’t following an auxiliary and aren’t used as adjectives). When an ergative verb shifts into this construction, it’s fully active, and you’re well within your rights to use it.

As with part one of this series, you might have to sit with this for a bit to absorb all the terms, but again, who wouldn’t? Take your time, and once you’re ready, move on to the third and final installment, which explores when you might want to use the passive voice and where you can find support for making that choice.