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Sentence Tip #5 - A Passive Blog Slams No Dunks

March 28th, 2007 | sentence tips

A paragraph filled with passive voice is like wimpy basketball.

According to my son’s favorite book (Balls!), basketball was originally a low scoring game. Coaches valued defense. The game moved slowly. Most players attempted shots with two hands—rather than the more common jump shot today. And no one had yet dreamed up the slam dunk.

Is there anything wrong with wimpy basketball? Do players need to dunk in order to play correctly? No. It’s about style. It’s about guts. It’s about putting everything on the line and trying to fly.

Good sentences fly. They have guts and style. Good sentences attack the reader and don’t let go.

Passive sentences not so much.

Is there anything wrong with wimpy, passive sentences? Do writers need powerful active, in your face verbs to write correctly? No. But if we don’t put everything on the line and try to fly, we might as well not mess around with writing anything at all. 

Annie Dillard put it this way:

As a writer, your freedom “is a by-product of your days’ triviality… If a shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes… Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already—worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?

Did you catch that? “Why not shoot yourself.” Ouch. The world doesn’t need our writing—and that is why our writing must be so powerful, so stunning, so stark and intense and so active that readers cannot resist it.

Now to the specific tips. 

What Is an Active Sentence?

As usual, I’ll simplify things a bit. Essentially, in an active sentence, the subject performs the action of the verb.

  • The man threw the ball.

Who was throwing the ball? The man. The action of throwing was being performed by the man.

What Is a Passive Sentence?

A passive sentence is the opposite. In a passive sentence, the subject receives the action of the verb.

You may have noticed that passive sentence winking at you just a few lines up. “The action of throwing was being performed by the man.” In that sentence, the subject “action” is not performing the verb “was being performed.”

If that’s too meta-grammatical for you (I couldn’t resist), try this simpler one.

  • The ball was thrown.

What is being thrown? The ball.

Who is throwing it? We don’t know.

Why Politicians Love Passive Voice

Mistakes were made. Votes were cast. Votes were lost. Wars were lost. Casualities were incurred. Monies were misspent. New taxes were deemed necessary.

Who is guilty of performing all of these heinous acts against our society? We’ll never know because the sentences are all passive.

Sure, we can speculate. But that’s what the politicians want us to do. We spend all of our time arguing semantics and pointing fingers and trying to find the subject responsible for all of this action. Meanwhile, they quietly pull strings and the big wheels of government continue to turn and keep our society more or less civil.

(I’m a little disenchanted with all sides right now.)

How Do I Recognize Passive Voice?

It’s really pretty simple because passive voice is a formula. Most of grammar works that way. But grammatical formulas have words in them rather than numbers. (Of course, that makes all the difference. Our variables do not have exact value, whereas the variables in math do.)

And here is the secret formula my grandmother taught me (really!):

  • PASSIVE VOICE = “to be” verb + past participle.

See? It’s as easy as cake. It’s a piece of pie.

What’s a “to be” verb? you ask. No worries, its just a simple list:

  • is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been

If you say it fast, you’ll find the words have a cadence that makes them easy to remember.

What’s a “past participle“? you ask. A participle is when a verb acts like an adjective. The sleeping dog. The steaming coffee. The typing man.  All of those verbs—sleep, type, and steam—are describing a noun. They are functioning as adjectives. And they are present participles.

A past participle is just in past tense. “The slept dog”? But that doesn’t make any sense! You’re right. Remember the variables in grammatical formulas don’t have exact values. If you want exact, go do math.

Or try these past participles: the written word, the requested document, the beaten man. (Poor guy, he was just typing a blog post!)

If we were feeling sick, we could make some passive sentences with our new found formula.

  • The words were written.
  • The documents were requested.
  • The man was beaten.

How Do I Fix a Passive Sentence?

First, you have to find them. The easy way to do this is to run a manuscript search on each of the “to be” verbs. See if you have combined them with a past participle to make a passive sentence. If you have, get rid of it.

Which brings me back to this section title. It’s really not so hard. Remember, in a passive sentence, the subject receives the action of the verb. All you have to do is figure out what is performing the action of the verb, then rewrite the sentence with that noun as the subject. Thoroughly confused? Look, it’s easy. Here’s my passive sentence:

  • The Word was written.

In order to make it active, I have to figure out who performed the action of the verb. Who wrote the Word? Duh, God did!

  • The Word was written by God.

Oops. I’ve included the guilty party, but I haven’t fixed my verb. This is what I find most often in the manuscripts I edit. All the information is there, it’s just wordy and weak. It’s a granny shot, not a slam dunk.

So let’s move God to the front of the sentence where he’ll receive more emphasis and where we’ll put him in charge of that verb.

  • God wrote the Word.

If These Sentences Are So Bad, Why Do They Exist at All?

I’d like to blame the politicians, but that wouldn’t be fair. After all, everyone tries to avoid taking the blame from time to time.

But there’s another reason. Sometimes, you want to emphasize the thing or idea that is receiving the action of a verb. Simply move it to the front of the sentence (where it receives additional emphasis as the subject) and make the verb passive.

On occassion, passive sentences are needed.

Sometimes defense wins the day. But you know what people really love? A slam dunk.


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