Tutor Tip Tuesday: Avoiding Passive Voice

Odds are, if you’re majoring in one of the humanities, then you’ve heard one of your professors talk about writing in the passive voice.  You might have even used the passive voice in one your papers, at which point your professor might have even given you a gentle chewing out.  Personally, I can’t disagree.  I’m a historian, and we especially loathe the passive voice because it is indirect, obscure, and, for lack of a better word, so passive.  Now, before my friends who are in the sciences get too upset with me, I’ll concede that the passive voice is acceptable in some disciplines (like science and engineering).  That said, because there are different contexts where it either is or is not acceptable to use the passive voice, it is important to be able to know what it is, what it sounds like, and how to change it, if need be, to the active voice.

So, what is the passive voice?  You are using the passive voice when you construct a sentence where the subject is being acted upon, rather than being the actor.  Here are two examples:

1.       Alabama was beaten by Auburn in the Iron Bowl.

In this sentence, Alabama is the subject, and it is being acted upon by Auburn(or Chris Davis, if you wanted to be really specific).  The construction is passive because instead of Alabama beating someone, Alabama is taking a beating.  Here is another example:

2.      Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth.

Again, we have a subject, Honest Abe, who is being acted upon.  Put another way the subject, Lincoln, is passive because he is being shot by Booth. [1]

Now that we know how and why this type of construction qualifies as passive, we have to ask ourselves, how do we modify them to be active?  It is actually easy in these cases.  For example:

1.      Auburn beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

We know, buddy. We think switching from passive to active voice is mindblowing, too.

and

2.      John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln.

Did you really have to use that as an example?

In these cases we changed the subjects to Auburn and John Wilkes Booth, and they are now acting upon Alabama and Abraham Lincoln, respectively.   The constructions are now active, we know who is doing what to who, we’re being direct, we’re being clear, and, most importantly, we’re avoiding the passive voice.

Happy writing.

- Jake

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[1] As an aside, it hurts me to have to use the passive voice to describe the passive voice.  It is what it is, though.