Is using passive voice “bad form”?

Question

Whenever I create a document in Microsoft Word, it complains about a lot of my sentences being in passive voice. But, when I read that sentence aloud, it sounds fine to me. I am not sure if it is just me and will a statement in passive voice sound strange to a native speaker?

So, my question is, is it considered bad form to use passive voice generally? Or in some specific cases like written communications only?

Edit: If it is ok to use passive voice, then why does MS-Word complain?

Answer 1

It's never bad form to use passive form. It's just that in speech, we tend to use a lot of this, but there's nothing wrong with using the passive form in writing, or in speech.

From the Passive Engineer:

Despite the admonitions of grammar checkers, the passive construction has a legitimate function. When you want to emphasize results, use the passive.

Note that it mentions grammar checkers, which I suppose is what you are getting.

Wikipedia states that:

Many language critics and language-usage manuals discourage use of the passive voice....This advice is not usually found in older guides, emerging only in the first half of the twentieth century

Also:

In 1926, in the authoritative A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Henry W. Fowler recommended against transforming active voice forms into passive voice forms, because doing so "sometimes leads to bad grammar, false idiom, or clumsiness

It's really just style, but nothing else to worry about.

Answer 2

That is quite a big question but the basics of when to use the passive run something like this:

In the following kind of sequence:

E.T. is a film about an alien and a boy. It was directed by Steven Spielberg in 1981. Its most memorable scene is the one where the boy and alien fly on a bicycle.

it sounds odd to say "Steven Spielberg directed it in 1981", because the focus of interest is the film E.T. rather than Spielberg. We might also imagine a sequence like this:

E.T. is a film about an alien and a boy. It was released in 1981. Its most memorable scene is the one where the boy and alien fly on a bicycle.

Here we don't even care who released it, we are only interested in the date.

Contrast this to

Steven Spielberg was born in 1942. As a boy he owned a movie camera. He directed his first movie, Jaws, in 1976. He also acted in "The Blues Brothers" as the Cook County Clerk.

In contrast to the above case, here it sounds odd to say "Jaws was directed by him in 1977" since the focus of the narrative is Spielberg rather than Jaws.

In neither case would changing passive to active or vice-versa create a grammatical mistake, though, this is more a matter of style.

Answer 3

As other posters have pointed out, there's nothing objectively wrong with the passive voice. It's a useful, grammatically correct feature of the English language.

However some people are prone to overuse the passive voice, which is why many sources of writing advice discourage its use. Unfortunately, this advice somehow transformed from "use the passive use sparingly" to "the passive voice is WRONG!" which is a rather silly extreme.

(But: I once had the eye-opening experience of editing three pages of writing entirely in the passive voice. Reading it was like slogging through molasses, but it took me a while to identify the passive voice as the issue. Overuse of the passive really is bad writing, even if certain English teachers and software programmers go too far in the other direction.)

Answer 4

I agree with Peter. It can serve as a cohesion device for juggling new information (usually contained in the predicate of a sentence) and old information (usually put into the subjecct of a sentence). Passive can also be the expected style in certain genres (science).

In English departments in America, professors teach stupid things like: avoid the verb 'be'... never use the passive voice. I think MS Word has cravenly defaulted to the writers' memories of freshman English classes where they were tasked with writing lively personal essays.

Answer 5

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published this very good, Creative Commons licensed write-up on what passive voice is, why it might be discouraged, and when it is "okay" to use it.

Answer 6

Most defenses of passive voice focus on (1) thoughtful use of it to emphasize the most important aspect of a particular statement; (2) thoughtful use of it to vary the form of sentences in a piece of writing, to avoid a protracted series of sentences that share the same subject-verb-object order; (3) historical use of passive voice by excellent writers; (4) the recentness and presumed baselessness of criticism of it by grammar scolds. The first three points are valid and important, I think; the fourth strikes me as being irrelevant at best.

The crucial element embedded in the first three defenses, however, is the author's conscious and well-conceived decision to use passive voice. In my experience, such intentionality is rare. More often, an author falls into passive voice unconsciously and repeatedly in situations where doing so does nothing to supply a desirable emphasis or to promote structural variety. The passive-voice sentence "The investigation was opened on Thursday by the FBI's Washington Field Office, she said," doesn't have any advantage that I can detect over the active-voice sentence "The FBI's Washington Field Office opened the investigation on Thursday, she said." The latter is two words shorter than the former and avoids relegating the actor in the sentence (the FBI's Washington Field Office) to a participial phrase; the result (to my ear) sounds crisper and cleaner.

But this is all a matter of taste, I suppose, since the sentence does identify the actor and attribute the action to that actor. The worst fault of passive voice is that all too often it serves to deliver action without an actor. The classic example of this fault is Ronald Reagan's famous pronouncement in the midst of the Iran/Contra scandal: "Mistakes were made." Certainly one could argue that Reagan simply wanted to emphasize the politically fraught concession implied by the word "mistakes"; but the formulation also has the convenient characteristic of failing to identify a source of the mistakes: The sentence identifies a result and an action, but no actor (in the non-Ronald Reagan sense of the word).

Though Reagan's formulation surely represents a thoughtful (and tactical) use of passive voice, many instances of actorless sentences do not. Consider this extended exercise in passive voice: "When the cost of proposals is born by the business side of the house, frivolous proposals are stopped, proposals are better prioritized, and what is proposed is more likely to have a true ROI to the business, reducing waste and abandoned projects." The first passive-voice element ("is born") has an identified actor ("the business side of the house"), but the next three ("are stopped," "are prioritized," and "is proposed") do not. A reader slogging through this sentence must either struggle to identify the unnamed actors (the allocation of cost "stops" frivolous proposals, the receivers of proposals "prioritize" them, and the makers of proposals "propose" them) or—as is much more likely—skate over the surface of the sentence without really comprehending it. The following reformulation of the sentence is far likelier to make sense to a reader: "Allocating the cost of proposals to the business side of the house discourages staffers from submitting frivolous proposals, encourages managers to give priority to the most promising suggestions, and increases the likelihood that proposals will offer a legitimate return on investment, thereby reducing waste and lowering the incidence of abandoned projects." The revised sentence is significantly longer than the original, but that's the price of spelling out who is doing what in a complex sentence, rather than leaving the task to the reader.

Finally, actorless passive voice crops up very frequently in situations where the unnamed actor responsible for the action in a sentence is in fact the author. In these instances, obscuring the author as the source of the action promotes a sense of the objective truth of the assertion. Thus, the wording "The makers of Battery Doctor/Battery Upgrade could not be contacted," frames a reporter's inability to reach a company while composing his story as the objective impossibility that anyone could have reached them: The company simply "could not be contacted." Again, such strategic use of passive voice may serve an author's purposes; but from a reader's perspective, it clouds and (perhaps) misleads rather than clarifying.

Answer 7

The passive voice is not as culturally acceptable as active in modern English writing. We prefer active sentences because they are more concrete. Passive sentences are not prefered, because we do not know who the subject is, making the whole thing more abstract. There is action, but no actor. It's as if ghosts are moving things rather than real subjects acting on objects. Using passive voice is like shirking responsibility. "The glass was broken." Who broke the glass? "Jake broke the glass." Mystery solved.