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Mistakes Are Made (but Using the Passive Isn’t One of Them)

October 1, 2011, 2:56 pm

Writing tutors, teaching assistants, usage columnists, and even word-processor grammar-checkers flag passives for “correction” because they have been told they should. (The disastrously confused Page 18 of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is often implicated—but don’t get me started on them.) These critics are often clearly inexpert at accurate identification of what they deprecate: collecting published critical comments about the passive by soi-disant rhetoric gurus, I have found that the most frequently occurring score for telling passives from actives is zero (I put this extraordinary statistic aside to discuss another day). Naturally, the critics also have no idea how many they use themselves.

Recently a colleague and friend with an American doctoral degree did me the kindness of commenting on a draft of mine. She made many solid suggestions that I accepted. But, en passant, she cast a disapproving eye on a couple of passive clauses (correctly identified, I should note), and stressed that she herself tried to avoid passives. I was very grateful for the latter: an empirical claim by a self-identified passive avoider! My colleague, you see, has an excellent and well-written book to her name—a record that could be checked. More on that later.

The piece I was writing—a sad task—was an obituary. In one sentence I explained how I had met the deceased: “I was introduced to her while she was visiting California.” My helpful colleague asked: “Why the passive? What’s wrong with ‘We met …’?”—and the answer is: Nothing at all, except that it omits the very thing I was saying, namely that this was an actual old-fashioned introduction, not a random encounter in an airport bar. So I ignored that well-intended advice.

The second passive my colleague fingered was this (which actually has a pair of them): “But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer.” The critical comment was:

Again, this is passive voice. Maybe appropriate here, I guess, but in general, I try to avoid the passive.

I was genuinely amazed. Am I seriously supposed to say “But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans”? And “when an oncologist named Price diagnosed her … “?

More generally, do the writing tutors of the world really think we should not report that a politician has been shot until we can specify the gunman? Do they honestly think it’s wrong to say that the lights are left on all night in an office building without supplying a list of the individuals who controlled the switches? We really have to get over this superstitious horror about passives. It’s gone beyond a joke.

Later I went back to that remark “I try to avoid the passive” and began my little empirical investigation. (If you want an accurate primer on how to identify passives, I provide one here). I opened my colleague’s book at the preface. I saw a passive clause in Sentence 3; a couple more in Sentence 4; the last sentence on the page has a passive relative clause, and the main clause is passive; on the second page, Sentence 4 has a passive main clause; Sentence 5 of Paragraph 2 has two more passive clauses; in Sentence 4 of Paragraph 3 we find another pair; in sentence 1 of Paragraph 4, yet another pair; in Sentence 2, one more. …

A research assistant took over and went over the whole thing systematically. His careful counting reveals that 26 percent of the transitive verbs in that five-page preface are in passive rather than active clauses. The maximum advisable percentage for readability according to one standard web writing advice site is 15 percent (nonsense, of course—my colleague’s writing is eminently readable—but I cite the figure merely as typical of the standard blah-blah). Merriam-Webster reports an average of about 13-percent passives in newspapers and magazines (which they note is much lower than the 20-percent rate they find in the classic 1946 essay by Orwell warning against passives). And here we have double that percentage, in the writing of an academic who imagines that she avoids passives!

But this is where modern American writing instruction has brought us. Totally unmotivated warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who (unwittingly) often use such sentences more than the people they criticize. And the warnings are consumed by people who don’t know enough grammar to evaluate them (which is why the percentage of passives in published prose continues basically unchanged over time). The blind warning the blind about a danger that isn’t there.

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http://twitter.com/realmagicdj DJ Weatherford

Thanks for the grammar lesson. I teach technical writing, and I throw in some writing tips here and there, especially for my students who aren’t native speakers of English.

My attitude about passives is pretty much “avoid them if it makes sense to,” but often that’s limited to encouraging the use of first person to distinguish work the writers did from the work of others.

But grammar lessons half a century ago didn’t include several of the terms you use, and I appreciate the introduction to them.
marcleavitt

During my newspaper career I had a simple rule about active and passive voice; use one or the other where appropriate. I realize that leaves me open to a cry of, “Who told him he knew when active or passive was appropriate?,” but it worked fine for me.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Well, there are some decent rules of thumb about when to use the passive. Somewhere or other, Pullum recommended Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams; I’ve read it recently and it explains this quite reasonably.

http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

Great post. I think I need to forward this to my boss and coworkers next time any of them complain about the passive voice in something we’re editing. The other day I was talking to a coworker about a particular article, and she said, “Oh, is that the one with all the passives?” I honestly hadn’t noticed, because apparently none of them had struck me as unclear, overly wordy, or infelicitous. It really is a superstition with many editors, and one that’s hard to talk them out of.
http://metaphorhacker.net Dominik Lukes

I think the bigger scandal is the advice university websites give their own students on academic essay writing. I’ve recently done a quick survey in my mission to stop essay markers fret over the use of first person and I was shocked by the amount of drivel out there. And what’s more drivel against which there is empirical evidence out there. So a university is at the same time exhorting students to be objective and support their statements by evidence and giving advice that runs counter to all available evidence which they never bothered to look for because they relied on shared common sense.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Looking at Amazon, it seems that there are maybe 20 or so fairly well-established books on the subject of scientific writing. The idea of getting them all and scanning them for the LanguageLog Top 20 Pieces of Wrong Advice, thereby creating, hopefully, a register of books without untrue claims about grammar and usage, is tempting.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

The “plans were disrupted” seems to be a way of getting the plans to the front of the sentence; they are surely implied or mentioned in the preceding matter. That is a perfectly good reason for using the passive.
The “was diagnosed” seems to me to be a special case that goes beyond merely not wanting to name the oncologist, etc. Like Donne’s bell that “tolls for thee”, it is a simple signal with ominous resonances.

“But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans” provoked me to have a think about non-passive alternatives, which I’ve put on my webspace rather than clog things up here.

But I could have saved myself the effort if it had occurred to me sooner to google the phrase “was diagnosed with”. This mostly turns up nasty diseases. It almost seems like a kind of fixed phrase for: here comes the bad news. Which makes it even odder that anyone would recommend changing it in this context.

PS I quite like being able to edit comments. First time I’ve seen this feature.
Chandra Friend Montoya

I teach high school English, and I tell my students that the passive should be used (heheh) when one doesn’t know or doesn’t care who did the action in the sentence. Or, to put it another way, if the action is more important than the actor, passive voice is called for (again, heheh).

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Well, that’s one of the reasons for using it. Another one would be that it’s a handy way of getting the word which would otherwise be the object of the active sentence up to the front. One might want to do that for emphasis or to link up with an idea from the previous sentence.

Alan Gunn

A good example of this kind of use, from Ambrose Bierce’s story “Parker Adderson, Philosopher”:

“Ten minutes later Sergeant Parker Adderson, of the Federal army,
philosopher and wit, kneeling in the moonlight and begging incoherently
for his life, was shot to death by twenty men.”

Parker Adderson is one of the two principal characters and the story is about his coming to the point of begging for his life. To turn this sentence around and start with the twenty men, none of whom we know or care about, would be absurd.

amoebam

I was amazed recently when I read the section on passives in my workplace’s style guide for official documents, and found that the advice it offered was actually good: “this is what a passive is (and it got it right!); here are some examples where active is better; here are some examples where passive is better. Use whichever is appropriate. If in doubt, active is a safer bet because some people have an irrational hatred of passives.”

I was so convinced it would be offering the usual terrible advice that I had to read it twice before I could believe my eyes!

josgirl13

What a great style guide!

RoamingCatholic

I delight in this. Being trained as a linguist and currently employed as a writing tutor, I sometimes feel caught between my knowledge of the principles of language use and the occasional misdirected prescriptivism of the grammar guides.
jffoster

And there are then of course those kinds of constructions in which a passive HAS to be used:

a. The man was nearly flattened by a runaway car but then got up.

b. *A runaway car nearly flattened the man but then got up.

Sebntence (b) is starred as ungrammatical if it is supposed to mean that the man got up. It is of course perfectly grammatical if it is taken to mean that the car got up. I.e. There is an English rule, or grammatical pattern, that allows deletion of a subject of the second of the two coordinate clauses if it is identical to the subject of the first. The passive in (a)’s first clause gets ‘man’ into subject position so the underlying subject ‘man’ in the second can be deleted.

Now of course one could pronominalize ’man’ in the second clause of (b) and have

b-prn. A runaway car nearly flattened the man but then [he] got up.

But that’s a different sentence with a change in focus. The point is that while both (a) and (b-prn) are grammatical English sentences and understood in the same way, (b) is ungrammatical unless understood in a quite different way.
mbelvadi

I heartily concur with the main point of this essay. Nevertheless, there is one place where passives cause trouble, and that’s in meetings (orally and later in the minutes) where it is decided that actions need to be taken (how’s that for two passives in a row?). I have frequently seen the use of passives in minutes, which inevitably result in everyone asking at the next meeting why something wasn’t done yet, and of course the obvious answer is that no one specific was assigned to do it! It seems like at almost every meeting I attend, I feel the need to interrupt the flow of discussion on to the “next” point to say, “umm, who exactly is going to do [that last thing we just agreed needs doing]?” This is very dangerous because all eyes turn to you when you do this, and your risk of being assigned the task goes way up!

http://www.facebook.com/pablo.j.davis Pablo J. Davis

I agree that the passive voice becomes pernicious when it is used to evade responsibility – ‘mistakes were made’ being the classic, though not worst, example. The result, rhetorically, is actions without actors, deeds without doers.
wnlureg

As one who writes course descriptions for the catalog and minutes for the faculty, does anyone have suggestions for keeping these in active voice? We have years and volumes of passive-voiced precedent in official documents. A dispassionate and succinct course description written by a passive third party (different from the more personal statement in a syllabus from teacher to students) “doesn’t sound right” with use of “I” and “we”. Maybe I just need to listen differently.

http://twitter.com/rwpickard Richard

Why do course descriptions need to be in the active voice to be energetic, gripping, etc? The passive voice isn’t what Strunk/White thought it was, ie an attack against the linguistic piquancy.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

>suggestions for keeping these in active voice?

I wouldn’t usually think of active or passive voice as being characteristics of whole passages … just take one verb at a time!

http://www.facebook.com/pablo.j.davis Pablo J. Davis

Well put, Pullum! To be freed from the incessant, schoolmarmish finger-wagging of the grammar advicemongers, whose zeal tends to far outstrip their knowledge… well, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.
droslovinia

I was blown away by this article, as well as deeply fascinated by your crafting of it. Thank you very much. One thing, I would add, however: I have found that passive voice corrections can be useful. In some of the more important works that were written by me, the grammar checkers were actually causing me to re-think things that were said. It can be hard to self-edit, so anything that causes your prose to be revisited can actually be quite helpful on that score. Their advice on passive voice is often ignored, but they are, nonetheless, helpful.
http://www.facebook.com/pablo.j.davis Pablo J. Davis

If only the passive-voice police had been around to stamp out this bad writing when it first appeared:

“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Genesis II.23, KJV

“To die: to sleep: / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d.” Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Babagranny

But at least he identified who endowed them.
jlawler42

As a peever would put it, these quotations just show how widespread the abuse of Passive has been throughout the history of English. Peevers are uncorrectable, and evidence will not deter them in the face of a Higher Truth. More productive to talk about raising taxes with Republicans.

honkytonkgirl

Professor Pullum, my day has been made.

At last the record has been set straight.

You are appreciated!!!!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000173694891 Dan Emery

Not your best work, Prof. Pullum; less an interesting take on academic language and more a passive aggressive swipe at someone who did you the favor of reading you work in progress.

dank48

“passive-aggressive”; “your work”

You’re welcome.
honkytonkgirl

Looks like playful professional badinage to me. ;-)

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1658708843 Deborah Farris

Wait till Doyne sees this!
deontic199

Wait till this is seen by Doyne!

Passive constructions are also typical in the Method sections of published research.
drangie

It is clear that mistakes were made.
dank48

As I recall it from “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell said, “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

I may be out to lunch on this, but I suspect he was unconsciously assuming that the taker of his advice would know when the active could be used to avoid a noxious passive and, further, that the t. o. h. a. would be able to tell the difference between the active and the passive.

Thanks to the demise of teaching grammar in grammar school, the latter is no longer the case. As I understand Orwell, his objective is not to the passive as such, but to its use precisely to disguise who performed the action. “The nation has been bankrupted” is less informative than “The cretinous subhumans of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue have bankrupted the nation.” Therefore the passive construction is favored by the tools of the cretinous subhumans.

marka

Well, except when one gets the actor[s] wrong … Should include:

Those who expect[ed] something for nothing, like a never-ending increase in equity, so that one may borrow the full amount, nothing down, and likewise not pay interest on an interest-bearing note/mortgage/lien … and those who invested in ‘securitized’ subprime loans, and those who continue to elect said politicians and continue to invest in said Wall Street creations — including many of the critics of same, and those who continue to eat from the hands of said cretins and subhumans … [hmm ... sounds a bit fascist/nazi/communist ?]
jlawler42

Small point — don’t mourn “the demise of teaching grammar in grammar school”.
English grammar was never taught in Anglophone grammar schools. What was taught was Latin. That’s where one learned grammar (because one can’t pick up Latin conversationally, one must learn its grammar to succeed). Once one has done this, one looks back at English and thinks “Oh. I see now how all that works.” And one then applies Latin grammar to English, and it sort of works, and that’s close enough for government work.But English classes were always composition and literature. If the teacher knew Latin (pretty universal until the mid-20th century), then the teacher could use Latin grammatical terminology with some consistency, and that was helpful. But if not (pretty universal for several generations now), all an English teacher can do is parrot the catechism of shibboleths and make students identify the Principal Parts of every word, so that what the credulous student now learns is garbage. Most students, however, are smart enough to recognize a crock when they encounter it, so they very wisely ignore it.

dank48

With all due respect, English grammar was taught reasonably well in at least one rather rural school fifty years ago.

God knows you’re right about the pernicious nonsense inflicted by idiots trying to fit English into a Latin mold. But sentence diagramming, subject-verb agreement, and all that were taught, however briefly.

marka

Bravo!
der_maverick78

Passive writing breeds passive thinking and behaving, for this reason I completely disagree with Professor Pullum.

jffoster

Do you have any evidence for this claim? BTW, Maori has both an active and a passive, but passives occur rather more often than actives. British occupying Aotearoa, New Zealand, did not find the Maori to be exactly “passive” in thinking or behavior.

der_maverick78

Other than my observations of undergraduate and graduate student writing, yes. http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/

jffoster

I assume that by “passive writing”, you mean the grammatical construction called the passive voice, which is what this post original and thread have been about. If you’re going to claim a correlation, let alone a causal connexion, between use of the passive voice in writing (or speaking) and “passive thinking and behaving”, you actually have to offer some evidence. I cannot find any whatsoever in anything you have said here or in the material you gave us a link to.

     You gave us a link to Rachel Toor’s CHE Article (April 2010)praise of George Orwell’s ”Politics and the English Language”. Well good. You will have noticed then that she only has one short passage referring to Passive Voice, and it presents no evidence at all. Now in the original Orwell essay, I can find absolutely no reference to, let alone any discussion of, the Passive v. the Active. Perhaps it is buried in there amidst his many passive voice sentences and I missed it. But the only reference I find to it is his list of rules wherein the 4th one is an admonition to us to don’t use it where we can use the active.  An admonition is neither argument nor evidence.

     You will also of course have read all 83 of the comments to Rachel Toor’s ode to Orwell. You will have found the link Nordicexpat gave is in comment 3 to David Beaver (a real linguist)’s strongly negative review of Orwell’s essay. You will also have noted my comment 43 in which I pointed out that the active sentence

      “Somebody made mistakes.”

conveys no more information than does the passive

      “Mistakes were made.”

  You may have also noted Todd Gilman’ Comment 67 in which he cites Geofffey Pullum’s scathing review of Stunk, er, Strunk & White, which I repeat here:

   Pullum, G. K.
    2009 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. The Chronicle [of Higher
Education] Review.  17 April.

You are of course free to “disagree completely with Professor Pullum” on the matter of the use of the passive voice or on any other. But aside from reference to your “observations of student writing”, you gave no evidence at all for the reason you stated, that “Passive writing breeds passive thinking and behaving”. An assertion is not an argument; and it is certainly not data. Nothing I could find in the link you provided made such an outright claim, let alone offerred any evidence supporting it. And there is considerable evidence from Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology suggesting it is not true. I gave you one such piece of evidence, — the notably greater occurrence of passives over actives in Maori. You did not address that at all. So my question stands. Do you have any evidence for your claim that “Passive writing [i.e. the passive voice ? jff] breeds passive thinking and behaving.”?

der_maverick78

I am not interested in “digital drama.” But, you have not disproven my theory, which is based off of “my” observations of “my” students’ writing and the correlated thinking and behaving.

jffoster

You don’t have a “theory”. A collection of vague speculations is not a theory. And _anecdote_ is not the singular of _data_ and “observations” alluded to are not even anecdotes.

There has been a considerable amount of research trying to discover whether there might be a relationship between variations in grammar and variations in culture and / or “thought”. Let me suggest you start with the following:

McWhorter, John
2008 Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. NY: Gotham Books.

You will particularly want to read Chapter 4 Does our Grammar Channel our Thought?

Rewarding reading,

old nassau’67

Two observations:
(1) “(The disastrously confused Page 18 of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is often implicated—but don’t get me started on them.)” Would “them” refer to “Strunk and White’s” (a compound possessive adjective, unworthy as a pronoun referent) or “Elements”?
(2) ““But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer.’” Grammar is a means to an emphasis. If you wish to accentuate the plans’ “gang aft agley”, fine as written. To write “In December, terminal cancer disrupted all plans” is also fine – if you wish to emphasize the disruptor rather than the disrupted.

quidfecisti

Your underlying premise in point 1 is simply wrong. See http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/possessives.html

Your proposed alternative in the active strikes me as dinstinctly inferior to Prof. Pullum’s original, but I suppose de gustibus non disputandum.

old nassau’67

(1) I did see the berkeley link: “But Kevin Keegan, a high-school journalism teacher from Silver Spring, Md., protested that a number of grammar books assert that it is incorrect to use a pronoun with a possessive antecedent like “Tony Morrison’s” that is, unless the pronoun is itself a possessive, as in “Toni Morrison’s fans adore her books.”….After months of exchanges with the tenacious Mr. Keegan, the College Board finally agreed to adjust the scores of students who had marked the underlined pronoun “her” as incorrect. In the phrase “on them”, “them” is not a possessive.
(2) Quis vos votum innuo. Grammar est opes ut an gravitas.

activelylearningtolearn

My favorite reason for passive voice is to protect from liability: “The suspect was redirected to the hood of his car.” Magically, the person performing the action disappears, and there’s no one to sue!
https://sites.google.com/site/pgrudin/ Peter Grudin

Bravo.
ewoodfor

Romeo was smitten my Juliet. Or did Juliet smite him?
widder4

As non-native speaker I admit only marginal competence but here it goes anyway. Obviously I agree that not every passive should [or even could] be eliminated. But providing examples for perfectly acceptable, maybe even preferable, passives does not necessarily show that some writers could not profit from decreasing their passive use. Intro-student papers come to mind where the frequent first sentence “Ever since the dawn of history it has been claimed that…” could be deflated without harm to ‘Descartes wrote…’. And while passive is not the only problem in the following sentence-worm it may just encourage adding more and more adjectives without thinking about the reader’s capacity of remembering what all these refer to: “Examples of fixed cohesion tend to be described in terms of being locked into a fixed,regimented, rigid, frozen, mechanical, or formulaic pattern; examples of discohesion as being chaotic, anarchic, or ‘all over the place’; and examples of responsive cohesion as having a fluid, adaptive, creative, organic, ‘alive’ quality about them”. I think decomposing this into several active sentences may be quite beneficial – even for natives…

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

Your sentence on varieties of cohesion strikes me as having more words than sense; you can’t fix that by tinkering with the grammar.

widder4

Too much honour, this was not ‘my’ sentence – I could never generate something so elaborate. It has been published though. I agree with you that it needs more than grammar-fixing. But, apparently, the editors thought otherwise….

Babagranny

I also try to avoid passives. But you seem to assume that in order to avoid a passive, the only option is to turn around the parts of your sentence. I think the point is to look at what you are really trying to say and identify the strongest verb phrase that will support the contention you are trying to make in that sentence. Perhaps, if your main point is the importance of the cancer diagnosis, you could use something like this: ” When the doctors unexpectedly diagnosed her cancer in December 2010 we suddenly had to scrap all our plans.” If your main point is changing the plans, then maybe this is better: “We suddenly had to scrap all our plans when the doctors unexpectedly diagnosed her cancer in December 2010.?

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

but “the doctors” or even just “doctors” are superfluous, if not downright distracting. Do we really need to be told that the diagnosis was made by doctors rather than plumbers, electricians or librarians?
And do we know that “we” is appropriate for the obituary writer and the deceased, or that he and she were the only people who had to change their plans?

Babagranny

One active verb I always wonder about is “die.” It somehow implies to me a willful or intentional act. I think “to die” is really a passive verb in disguise as an active voice.

jffoster

Not quite. It’s an intransitive verb, like _go_, _come_, or _sleep_.

Note what a passive form actually is.   In a passive, the subject if present is demoted to be the oblique object of a preposition, the original direct or, in English (but not all languages) the original indirect object is “promoted” into subject position, and the verb gets MARKED with extra morphology — the Auxiliary BE plus the actual, or main, verb’s past participle.   So

      Jill          wrote         him    a letter.
A letter was writt-en   him     by Jill
     He      was writt-en a letter by Jill.

In English, only transitive verbs can have a passive voice form.   Intransitives cannot.
We never say

*He was slept.    Nor do we say

*(For) six hours were slept by him.

We say

    He died in Venice.   but never

*In Venice was died by him.

So to call ‘die’ an “active” verb confuses things. I think what you may mean here is that it has a simple form ‘He dies.’   rather than a morphologically complex form _was died_, but the subject is the semantic patient and not the agent and undergoes the state or process itself. This is often the case with subjects of intransitive verbs and in fact there are quite a number of languages which in morphological and/or syntactic treatment lump the intransitive subject together with the transitive direct object while treating the transitive subject differently. Languages which do this are called ERGATIVE languages while those like English are called _ACCUSATIVE. The normal unmarked transitive sentence in a language like English is in the ACTIVE voice; the normal unmarked transitive sentence in a language like Basque or Ancient Sumerian, or Niuean, is in the ERGATIVE Voice.

But in your reflection that prompted your comment, you may have hit upon a difference among intransitive verbs that some, quite a number, of languages actually show in overt morphology. That is the difference between intransitive verbs where the subject is strictly a semantic patient undergoing the activity or state of the verb versus intransitives where the subject is at least partially a causal or culpable participant.   So in the intransitive

    Sue fell.

   In English this is noncommital as to whether it was strictly inadvertent and unaviodable or whether it was due in part to her clumsiness or inattention.   But a number of languages in various parts of the world, particularly in North America and in the Caucasus, will mark the subject or the verb agreement affix or both in one way if the “fallee” is actively envolved and another way if the fallee is strictly the innocent fallen. I.e., those languages treat some intransitive subjects like transitive subjects but others like transitive objects. Linguists call languages which do this “Active” languages (in contradistinction to accusative languages or ergative languages.)

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

>In Venice was died
German has subjectless intransitive passives that can even do without the dummy subject es. In Venedig wurde gestorben doesn’t make much sense, but if we embellish it a bit, e.g. In Venedig wird besonders im Spätherbst gern gestorben, wenn der Nebel sich wochenlang über die Stadt legt… then it begins to say something.

Maybe one of the better-known occurrences is “O’zapft is’!“, which the Oberbürgermeister of Munich shouts when he has succeeeded in tapping the first barrel of the Oktoberfest.

jffoster

Yes, you can have intransitive passives, which I think is what you mean, in German and in a number of other languages. _Es wird gegangen._, for instance. Literally “It becomes gone.”, usually translated into English as something like
   ‘Someone will go.’ or,
‘There’ll be (a) going.’.

Another fairly common one is _Es wird gesungen_.’    ‘There will be singing.’

A number of languages can do this; English of course is not among them.

http://twitter.com/Egocrata Egocrata

Good lord, thanks for the article. English is my second language (I grew up in Spain) and the constant, incessant nagging from editors and MS Word on how many passives I use drives me bonkers. It is just terrible advice to target a specific verb voice as bad writing, specially one that has a clear, specific use. Spanish might be more flexible than English when using passive, but the general aversion to it is just plain idiotic.

jlawler42

Not only that, but the software can’t really recognize a real passive. Turn it off. Mechanical grammar checkers are hopelessly incompetent, even worse than Strunk & White.

wrylyfox

I totally agree with you. I can remember when a well known word processor app would flag instances of “passive voice” in my texts. Well, that is what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I speak and write English in my personality. That’s just my style…get over it.
tiredofit

I don’t really like the passive voice, though I use it when appropriate. I tend to not be an absolutist with grammar or syntax, and am happy to break the rules when it feels right.

But you would never see me use “soi-disant ” or “en passant” when I am writing in English, and in particular I wouldn’t call attention to the use with italics.
dank48

I’ll try again.

“The comment was replied to.”

“A reply was made to the comment.”

Both of these are passive; both could be amplified with a “by so-and-so” but needn’t be.

“Someone who apparently can’t focus on the topic under discussion but instead is easily distracted by irrelevant details of example sentences replied to the comment.”

It’s possible the active is preferable to the passive here.
Guest

It is to be noted that three subjects of instruction recommend/require ignorance over knowledge: religion, sex, and grammar.

jlawler42

Well, none of them is particularly good in the “instruction” department, are they?

tylerjohn

There are some good examples of bad uses of the passive voice, though. My all-time favorite, from a student in a philosophy class, is “What is being attempted to be shown in this paper is…” He was trying, of course, to follow another stupid rule – to avoid using the first person.
finaleyes

Loved this piece. Thanks. As an editor, I usually help writers avoid the passive voice only if they’ve resorted to it out of laziness or lack of imagination. But sometimes, the passive voice can achieve a certain gentility or politeness unavailable in the active voice, which I think you demonstrated quite nicely in your article.
http://www.thePaepae.com Peter A

Thanks for this article, it made me grimace in recognition — just shows formulaic criticism (of anything) is a rocky, potholed road.

I think it was Somerset Maugham who described one the most ‘irresistible human urges’ as the desire to tweak someone else’s manuscript.It is, also, of course, fairly irresistible to want to look at one’s critic’s own performance … as you did. Gotcha.
- Peter
http://www.ThePaepae.com
WHF

Part of the problem is the task she was assigned. (You assigned her.) I always hate to be asked to comment on others’ work because I feel charged to say something helpful, whether or not I actually have anything to say or not. Poor thing, that you have chosen thus to publicly chastise her when she probably didn’t want to read the damned manuscript anyway. As for your point, you are spot on.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000068165284 Grover Jones

Just seen In an MSN money article:

‘There’s a little more to the Best Buy’s press release: “We are very
sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and we have notified the
affected customers.”
Again, note the use of the passive voice —
“this” refers to the “situation” that Best Buy “encountered.” The
“situation,” not Best Buy’s poor operations, “has caused” inconvenience
to customers. It’s not something Best Buy did wrong.’

It’s hard to note the use of the passive voice when it is not present!

http://money.msn.com/investing/why-best-buy-is-destined-to-fail-forbes.aspx?page=3