Is Passive Voice Actually Bad?

When people give writing advice, one of the most common proverbs is to “avoid passive voice.”

But what does that mean? And why is passive voice bad?

Let us first define our terms. To put it the simplest, in passive voice, the object and subject of a sentence get reversed. A basic sentence in active voice typically goes noun/verb/object. For example:

“Jenkins ate pie.”

In that sentence, Jenkins is the subject, “ate” is the verb, and the pie is the object. That’s active voice.

Passive voice, by contrast, flips it so that the object is the subject of the sentence. Like this:

“The pie was eaten by Jenkins.”

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. In active voice, Jenkins, the subject of the sentence, is acting upon the pie. In passive voice, the pie, the subject, is being acted upon by Jenkins.

Both sentences have identical meanings. Either way, Jenkins is getting his pie! So why is active voice better than passive voice?

1.) Passive voice is more work to read. This is simple mathematics.  “Jenkins ate pie” has half the words of “The pie was eaten by Jenkins”, which means it takes half the time to read. When writing any kind of prose, the goal is to convey the maximum meaning with the fewest amount of words. “Wordy” is not a good adjective to have applied to your writing. If your writing is wordy and hard to read, it is likely that the reader might not grasp your meaning. If you’re a fiction writer, that means the reader will get bored and go do something else. As Jerry Pournelle said, fiction writers are trying to separate Joe from his beer money (or Josephine from her beer money), and anything that reduces the odds that Joe/Josephine will spend beer money on your book is a bad thing.

2.) Bad habit. Passive voice, in general, seems like a bad habit in writing to which people naturally gravitate. Like, many fields of endeavor have bad habits that newcomers need to learn not to do. Firearms instructors will tell you that people need to be trained not to rest their finger on the trigger of the weapon and to always check if it is loaded, if there’s a round in the chamber, and if the safety is on when they pick up a firearm. Personal trainers will tell you that people need to be trained to do deadlifts and squats properly so they’re not lifting with their backs. Artists will tell you that the big breakthrough in learning to draw is not to make symbols of what you see (like a smiley face is a symbol of an actual human face) but to actually put down on paper what your eye observes.

It seems the mind naturally wants to write in passive voice. I’ve even met people who like writing in passive voice, and believe it gives their writing an air of authority and even gravitas. This is mistaken – passive voice is a bad habit the a writer needs to avoid because too much of it makes prose harder to read than necessary.

3.) Air of diffidence.

Passive voice uses a lot more words than active voice, which means that your document is longer and therefore more effort to read. That is quantifiable.

Less quantifiable but still apparent is that a lot of passive voice is much less energetic than active voice. It sounds weaker, more timid, less confident, less sure of itself. Passive voice gives an air of diffidence to prose. Which, at the proper time and place, might be a good thing. (More on that below.) But most of the time, it just sounds bad.

Especially in action scenes. Consider this quote:

“Jenkins slashed the sword through the orc’s neck, sending the creature’s head rolling away across the flagstones.”

It would be much worse like this:

“The sword was slashed through the orc’s head by Jenkins, and the creature’s head was sent by the blow to roll away across the flagstones.”

Much worse!

Now, you might say to yourself that you’re not a fiction writer and have no desire to become one. This isn’t applicable to you. Wrong! Even in business writing, especially in business writing, active voice is preferable. Consider this example:

“By adding new features to the product, we anticipate a forty percent rise in sales in the East Asia region.”

Clear and concise. By contrast:

“If new features were to be added to the product, our sales in the East Asia region will be enhanced by forty percent.”

That’s much worse.

I think some of the tendency towards passive voice is a side-effect of school. Back when people are in high school and college, writing assignments usually involve “write a three page essay” or “write a thousand words” about a various topic. So if you’ve ever graded student essays, you’ll know they’re very good at padding things, which is why the sentences are totally, completely, massively, heavily, seriously, grotesquely, laboriously, and stupendously overladen with as many adverbs as possible. Passive verbs, as we mentioned above, use more words than active ones, so I suspect quite a few people get into the habit of using them as students and then get stuck with it.

So writing clear and lucid prose is a useful skill regardless of one’s occupation. I know several people who have attained professional advancement simply because they can write more clearly than their coworkers.

4.) Passive voice has its uses.

The title of this post was “Passive Voice Is Bad”, but that’s hyperbole. Passive voice is ultimately a tool, and it has its proper time and place. (It’s just not as often as beginning writers think.)

Passive voice is often useful in dialogue. You can use it to indicate that a character is uncertain about something, or is thinking something through aloud. You can use it to indicate characterization, when a character might have a tendency towards diffidence and wordiness in their speech.

Another good use for passive voice is simply getting on with things. Remember, in fiction the goal of the prose is to tell the story, and sometimes you just need to get on with the story.

Simply using sentences like “It was Friday” or “His girlfriend was an over-promoted sales rep” or “The car was parked across the street” is fine. Sometimes you just want to tell the reader that it was Friday or that the car is parked on the other side of the street so you can get on to the more interesting parts of the story. It’s a mistake to spend too much time on the “liminal” parts of the story where the characters are moving on to the more interesting scenes, and sometimes writers fall into that trap. (For example, a certain Major Fantasy Author wasted hundreds of pages of the fifth book of his series describing an extremely long and tedious river journey.)

So there nothing wrong with using some passive voice to lay down some necessary info and get on to the more interesting parts. The trick is not to overuse these sentences and to shake them up.

For example:

“It was Friday.”

Perfectly serviceable, but we can eliminate the passive voice and get the sentence to do some characterization for us.

“At 8 AM on Friday, Jenkins had already eaten his third Egg McMuffin, with the fourth waiting on his tray.”

This lets the reader known the important information – it was Friday – but it also includes some character details about Jenkins. It’s even better if you can wrap some sensory detail into it.

“At 8 AM on Friday, Jenkins unwrapped his fourth Egg McMuffin, the greasy paper crinkling under his sweat-damp fingers.”

This sentence accomplishes the same thing, but includes two senses – touch and sound.

Let’s try another one:

“His girlfriend was an over-promoted sales rep.”

This is a perfectly fine sentence, though it depends on what follows. This sentence works better:

“Jenkins would never admit it, but he thought Maura had been promoted past her competence when she left sales behind for management.”

Or we could rework it for more character details about Jenkins and Maura:

“As Maura rambled on for the fourth night in the row about her first major project as district manager – a revision to MegaCorp’s employee dress code – Jenkins realized with growing concern that his girlfriend might not have been quite as intelligent as he believed. That the charm and attention to appearance that had served her so well in sales had covered over her complete inability to understand a business model. He made a mental note to sell his remaining shares of MegaCorp as soon as possible.”

But let’s not pick on Maura too much. Consider the basic sentence:

“Jenkins was a high-functioning alcoholic.”

Again, this is perfectly serviceable. But we can make the sentence do much more for us:

“Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off the thirty or forty other discarded bottles. Hadn’t that been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”

Even better, let’s engage a few more of the senses in the description:

“Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off the thirty or forty other discarded bottles. the sour odor of the dregs coming to his nose. Hadn’t that been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, sharp and minty against his tongue, and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”

In the end, passive voice is a tool like any other. It’s a bit like watering down the sauce when you’re cooking. There’s a time and place for that, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it.

-JM