An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Seven -- The passive voice was used by me

Look, I'm procrastinating about the adjectives chapter. Can you blame me? But that's not why I wrote this one now.

I got dinged by a critique partner recently for use of the passive voice, with good reason. Why? Because I'd never really sat down and studied it. So, in effort to make my writing better, I thought I'd do this one and adjectives can wait for another week. And you lot can suffer along with me.

You know the drill by now; let's show an example.

Janet was sent sprawling by a vicious left hook from von Blicken.

Remember subjects and objects? The subject of a verb is the thing that does the verb, and the object is the thing that the verb is done to. In this case, 'sent sprawling' is the verb, von Blicken is the subject and Janet is the object. In English, the normal order is subject, verb, object.

Well, when you're in passive voice, you switch it all up: you write object, verb, subject. In order to make the grammar work you need to add some little bridging words in. Those are normally 'was' or 'is', although there are others.

So what's the problem with passive voice?

There's two complaints. The first is that it makes your writing more, well, passive. The passive voice sounds detached, removed from the action and its consequences. This is, of course, why it's used by human resources departments the world over. 'It was decided that...' is how you're going to be told that there's no more company-provided yodelling sessions.

The second is more mechanical. Make it go faster, lose the redundant words, keep it rolling at breakneck pace: that's our motto. Every word we don't need is a word that stands between us and our incredibly attractive and intelligent readers. (Who, by the way, are looking very good today. Did they do something new with their hair?)

The solution, in this case, is very easy. Restructure the sentence so that the subject is first. With a bit of luck, you'll end up with a shorter sentence; and we'll talk about why you might not later.

A vicious left hook from von Blicken sent Janet sprawling.

In this case, it does read better. It's more immediate, and we deleted two words yet retained the same meaning. Get up, Janet: only you can save the world...

So, that's what the passive voice is. You're a veteran of this book by now. You know what's coming next.

#

Have you been on wikipedia at all? That's not so much a single passive voice, more a great apathetic choir. And there's a good reason for that. The passive voice lets you omit the subject from a sentence, so you just end up with an object and a verb; and you do that because either you don't know about the subject so you can't write it; or the object of the sentence is actually its focus. Here's an example of this, and it's a very wikipedia sentence.

Slicken von Blicken was crowned a hundred years ago.

Passive voice, right? If we wanted to make it active, we'd put the subject first. But this sentence has no subject! I guess in this case it's von Blicken's loyal robot hordes, but they're not what we're writing about. Because of a quirk of the verb 'crowned', the interesting noun is the subject, not the object; and a rewrite will make the sentence longer, and significantly worse. We'd need to introduce a subject where there wasn't one before, it would all just get terrible.

So: if you used the passive voice to elide a mysterious or boring subject, keep it like that. Here's another one.

Von Blicken pulled a banana from his holster. He cursed. Mistakes had been made.

This is the classic way to deflect responsibility. I'm using it here for humour, although it's a pretty old joke, and not very funny. Another, similar use, is to use the passive voice to do what it does best: deliberately introduce passivity and detachment.

Dazed by the blow, Janet fell to her knees. She was being laughed at by the goat...

Here we're trying to get into Janet's head by making the writing less distinct. Honestly, I can take or leave that. I don't think it gives you much other than a lot of words. 'The goat laughed at her...' is, in my opinion, much crisper. But, the point is, once you understand the way the passive voice slurs your narrative, you can exploit it.

Here's a good one. How do you deal with this?

The goat was enormous, and its horns blotted out the floodlights.

'Was' means passive voice, so I should rearrange the subject to move to the front, right? No! I was a stinky cheater, and wrote this to show you how 'was' doesn't always mean we're being passive. Here the verb itself is the past form of 'to be', and forms of that verb do all sorts of weird stuff with language. This sentence is not passive. You can tell because there's no other verb sat next to 'was'.

Now, some people say that you should reduce your use of the verb 'was', and they'd complain about that poor goat... But that's for another day!

#

It's time for the search terms.

OK, yes, you're going to want to search for 'was', 'were' or 'wasn't'; or 'is' or 'isn't' if you're writing in the present tense. But you're going to need to check for other verbs in the sentence to make sure it really is a passive sentence, and not a use of 'to be'.

There are a few other classic passive tells too: 'has been', 'hasn't been', 'had been', 'hadn't been', 'will be' and 'won't be'.

Let me know what you think, passively, in the comments!