Passive vs active voice

The last thing we’re going to look at in this lesson is how verbs create what are called active and passive voice.

Here are examples of active voice and passive voice. What do you think the difference is?

But Aunt Marge suddenly stopped speaking.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(1999)

"Did your car get rear-ended again?"

Wonder(2012)

In active voice, someone is doing something (Marge is stopping speaking).

In passive voice, someone is having something done to them. (Your car is getting rear-ended.)

The difference between active and passive voice is very important in writing.

People argue a lot about when it's okay to use passive voice. One reason is because people often use passive voice to avoid taking responsibility.

For example, do you see the difference between the two halves of this statement?

Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit.

Draft Report to Congress(1876)

If someone says, "Mistakes were made," it sounds like an acknowledgment of fault, but really you have no idea who made the mistake, or whether they're being held accountable. Did the speaker make the mistake? Or was it just some random person in a land far away? Nobody knows!

That's the sneaky power of passive voice. It hides the agent responsible for the action; and potentially shields them from consequences.

On the other hand, sometimes you genuinely don't know who did something. At the beginning of a murder mystery, we don't know who did the murder:

Anthony Marston was murdered, of course.

And Then There Were None(1940)

It's not much of a mystery if we just say:

The butler murdered Anthony Marston, of course.

And sometimes we don't care who did something. For example, when we write scientific reports, what happened in the experiment is usually a lot more important than who ran the experiment:

The participants were first fitted with a headset.

Students apply research methods to consumer decisions about cognitive enhancing drinks(2014)

We could say:

Sue fitted the participants with a headset first.

But then people might start wondering who Sue is, which might distract them from the important information about how the experiment was done.

So we broadly have three uses for the passive voice:

To deliberately obscure the person or thing responsible for something happening to avoid accountability (common with politicians and other leaders)
To describe an action where we don't know who or what is responsible (like in a mystery story)
To remove the person or thing responsible for something because it's not important (like in a scientific report)

Let's take a quick look at the mechanics of passive voice.

To understand the mechanics of passive voice, it helps to compare to active voice:

Active: Chuck ate a banana.
Passive: A banana was eaten.

Can you see two differences?

In the move from active to passive voice, Chuck, the original subject of the sentence, has vanished, and the main verb ate has picked up a secondary 'being' verb and changed tense.

So passive voice is usually created by:

1. Placing be or get (in any of their tense forms) in front of a main verb:

The money will be put in the cookie tin.
The battle was lost.
The monkey got infected again.

2. And hiding the subject of the sentence:

(Who will put the money in the cookie tin?)
(Who lost the battle?)
(What infected the monkey again?)

You need both these elements to create passive voice. A being verb by itself is not enough. For example:

"Nigel was late" is a statement of being; it's not passive voice.
"Nigel was eaten" is passive voice, because it raises the question, "Who or what ate Nigel? When did it happen? Why are we only finding out now?"

One of the easiest ways to check if a be is showing passive voice is to ask, "Who or what did it?"

If the actor is right there in the sentence, then it's active voice. If they're not visible, like in the examples above, then it's passive.

Try to figure out which of these snippets below are using passive voice and which aren't.

I was forced to lean against a tree for support.

Frankenstein(1818)

We don't know! It's passive.

He was shivering and exhausted, but he was safe.

Storm Boy(1963)

He was! These are both active.

If eyes hadn’t been shining out of the deep, dark sockets, he might have been a corpse.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(1999)

The eyes were shining. He might have been a corpse. Again, these are both active.

Chaco Canyon became a black hole into which goods were imported but from which nothing tangible was exported.

Collapse(2005)

Chaco Canyon became a black hole. That one's active.

We don't know who imported goods or who exported nothing. Those are both passive voice.

We're often told to use active voice as much as possible. It tends to be easier to follow, and more engaging because it describes action more directly. But as we've seen, passive voice can be very useful, and it's an important part of language.

Here's a more complicated snippet using a combination of passive and active verb groups.

Codes came into use; agents were never permitted to forget that their work was illegal, that all evidence must be destroyed, and nothing was put into writing that could lead to conviction, for the courts allowed little delay between arrests and imprisonment.

Flight to Freedom: The Story of the Underground Railroad(1968)

What was illegal? The agents' work was illegal.

Who allowed little delay? The courts allowed little delay.

What could lead to conviction? Writing could lead to conviction.

But who never permitted the agents to forget? Who must destroy evidence? Who didn't put anything in writing?

We could make some guesses about who the actors are based on context, but the snippet doesn't explicitly tell us. (Which makes sense when you're describing a covert, secretive operation.)

Based on our guide above, you need be/get + main verb to be halfway to creating passive voice, you'd have to say the phrase, "Codes came into use" is not passive. That's true in a purely grammatical sense—there is no grammatical passive voice marking in that snippet.

But the fact is that codes are not actors; someone was using the codes, and those actors are hidden from view.

We could change the verb itself to surface the actors: "Agents began to use codes".

But we can't just shuffle the sentence around to get a 'more active' version.

Describe something that happened in the past, but hide the actors behind passive voice.

Verb groups

Passive vs active voice