CATPAW

The Passive Voice: A Special Case of “To Be”

My students often tell me that a teacher has told them not to use the passive voice, or to use it less often. Many of those students say that the warnings against the passive voice did not come with clear explanations of how to identify it. So let’s start there!

Defining the passive voice, first method: Did zombies do it?

The best quick way to find the passive voice is to ask whether zombies could have performed the action of the sentence—if you simply add “by zombies” to the end. (The “by zombies method has become a meme; you’ll see it lots of places, including the website of the U.S. National Archives.) Take these two sentences:

• Rosa takes good care of her plants.
• The plants are well cared for.

Now try the zombies test! Adding “by zombies” to the first sentence gives you “Rosa takes good care of her plants by zombies.” That makes no sense! The sentence uses the active voice.

However, the second sentence becomes “The plants are well cared for by zombies.” Perfectly logical! That sentence uses the passive voice.

The zombies test works because the passive voice uses an action with no actor. The first example already has an actor, Rosa, so adding the zombies doesn’t work. However, by leaving out the actor, the second sentence leaves room for the zombies to creep in.

That opening for the zombies relates to the common advice not to use the passive voice. The passive voice leaves out the subject performing an action, so it breaks the subject-verb-object chain that often drives a vivid sentence. People sometimes use passive verbs to avoid assigning responsibility, as in “Mistakes were made.” (Who made the mistakes? Perhaps zombies?)

Sometimes, that evasion of the subject becomes useful. For example, you might want to say that the sun was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and you want to call attention to the date, not the agency of the formation. The passive “was formed” serves that purpose well.

Defining the passive voice, second method: “to be” plus the past participle

As much as I love the zombies method for finding the passive voice, you may also want to know a more specific, technical definition. CATPAW is here to help!

The passive voice consists of a “to be” verb plus a past participle.. The past participle is the verb form that usually has an “-ed” ending in English, as in “worked” or “played,” or irregular versions such as “begun” or “built.”

Here are two more examples:

• Active: I made this delicious cake!
• Passive: Baking soda was used instead of baking powder, so the cake was not so good.

Bonus note: in the second half of the passive sentence, “was” is not an example of the passive voice. It’s an ordinary form of “to be.”

• Active: The monitor should check the radiation levels every hour.
• Passive: The radiation levels should be checked every hour.

Most writing gains clarity and energy from specific, concrete subjects and verbs. When you use the passive voice, ensure that you do so with a purpose: that you intend to obscure the subject of an action, or that you are writing in a specific mode (such as certain kinds of scientific writing) that prefers passive constructions. The passive voice can be used well—by zombies or by anyone else—as long as it is used thoughtfully.