Learning to Love Passive Construction

by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Writers of fiction are often told to avoid passive sentences. Nonfiction writers sometimes get the same advice.
The reasons for such admonitions are many. After all, they tend to tug backward on the forward momentum we are usually after. But passive construction can be used effectively, too. When we sense that there would probably be no passive constructions, we should listen. Our writing may improve if we force ourselves to accept passives, regardless of their ugliness. We can utilize what they’re good at in our writing and, at the same time, recognize their flaws so we can avoid them when they are just plain ugly.
Luckily, good editors are here to help. Yours may help you avoid passive constructions by making suggestions to “activate” them. There are times, however, when you must do your own editing. Here are some examples to try your hand at.

1. “I was offended by the President’s proclamation.” (Some argue that this isn’t a true passive because the hidden subject is evident, but when you put the object of the preposition, “the President’s proclamation,” at the front and ditch the helping verb, you’ll see how the sentence comes alive.)
2. “Catherine was being watched.”
3. “Catherine was being silly.”

Here is your cheat sheet:
For the first you would, of course, make it “The President’s proclamation offended me.”
For the second, you’ll have to provide the intended subject. It might look like this:

“The fuzz watched Catherine.”

(So, maybe you’d be more formal and call them coppers!)

The third example might throw you a curve. That’s because it isn’t a passive sentence, according to the most restrictive definition. Here’s the thing: we tend to assume a construction is passive when we see helper verbs and “ing” words. But these are not always passive indicators. That’s one more thing for you to figure out in addition to deciding whether you want to avoid a passive construction. You’ll find a complete discussion of the dreaded “ing” words in my book The Frugal Editor.
You can still avoid the not-so-active-sounding helper verb with a mini rewrite:

“Gracie thought Catherine was being silly.”

You might ask, “So, if these slowpoke constructions stall the forward motion of my prose, what are the good reasons for using them?”
Few, if any, etymologists argue that language doesn’t develop or change unless there’s need. When we recognize what passive construction and its copycats can do for us, we may grow to love it. Here are reasons you might want to intentionally use passive verbs:

1. You want to slow down the movement in a saga set in the 19th century. I do some of that (very judiciously!) in my This Land Divided, now being shopped by my agent. That the first chapter of that book won WriterAdvice.com’s Scintillating Starts contest proves that passive is pretty—sometimes.
2. You need to set one character’s dialogue apart from another’s to avoid overworked, fussy dialogue tags or because the tenor of that voice suits that character’s personality better than strong active verbs.
3. You’re writing political copy and you want to avoid pointing a finger at, say, the FBI, because you don’t want to get put on the dreaded U.S. No-Fly list. So instead of saying “The FBI is watching Carolyn.” You say, “Carolyn is being watched.” It’s a device that lets you avoid pointing a blaming finger at the perpetrator.
4. If you write copy for pharmaceutical TV ads, your career could depend on knowing how to use passive voice. I watch TV commercials carefully because I do some acting, and the voiceovers behind all those happy, healthy faces make me cringe. The use of passive voice clearly avoids assigning any responsibility for all those side effects and deaths. One actually says, “Deaths have happened.”

We need to know how to make verbs active, when to leave them alone, and, yep, when to use them to our advantage. That way, we can take a red pen to them when they are likely to brand us as amateurs, occasionally put them to very good use, and even learn to love them.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an award-winning novelist, poet, and author of the How To Do It Frugally Series of books for writers. She taught editing and marketing classes at UCLA Extension’s world-renowned Writers’ Program for nearly a decade and carefully chooses to edit one novel she believes in each year. The Frugal Editor, now in its second edition, is a USA Book News award-winner as well as the winner of Reader View’s Literary Award in the publishing category. She is the recipient of both the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award and the coveted Irwin award. She appears in commercials for the likes of Blue Shield, Disney Cruises (Japan), and Time-Life CDs and is a popular speaker at writers’ conferences.