Writing: Passive Voice Prevention

Toady we are going to revisit the very basics of sentence structure to discover a wierd pscyhological trick that can corrupt your writing. I’m aiming for a more foundational starting point than usual since “If students don’t yet know how to write a good sentence, they’ll never write good paragraphs, let alone good essays” (Wexler, 2019, p. 225) and those good essays are what I want to help my clients produce.

The common structure of an active sentence is: subject verbs object. For example,

The prince stabbed the king.

But we have a tendency to rearrange our thoughts based on status. Because the king is higher status and more attention-grabbing than the prince, we could reasonably reorganize the prior sentence as:

The king was stabbed by the prince.

This is “passive”: the king is not taking action, the king is just sitting there getting stabbed; somebody else is taking action here. Most textbooks will explain that the pattern you just saw was a sequence of past-tense and past-participle (“was stabbed”) and that is the 🚩red flag🚩 for editing (Mewburn, 2021).

The psychology of passive voice

But why was such a choice made in the first place? The king is placed at the front of the sentence because we believe that everybody can agree that the king is of preiminent importance (King > Prince) and worth paying attention to. But! The king just got stabbed: the point behind the sentence (now sticking in the king’s guts 🗡️) is that it is the prince who is worth paying attention to now. Update your priors, the mental formulation your relied on to start with the king is out of date.

Here are a few more examples:

The prince was told to assassinate the king.

The king was advised to have the treasonous prince promptly executed.

Both of these are clearly focusing us on the high-status person, but they also hide a power relationship: what we are not allowed to see is that the sleep-deprived prince was being advised by a malelvolent spirit he met in the wilderness while it is Steve who the king trusts enough to listen to when making high-stakes decisions. And when you see a newspaper publishing stories that use a passive voice (like about “protestors were tear-gassed”), it is because they are being deferential to the (typically: state, police) powers that they do not want to provoke by suggesting responsibility.

For where you are at, prefer provocative communication to timidity.

Subject verbs noun repeatedly

This even works when the action is being done by a non-human. For example, compare:

I felt the cold wind pushing me back.

to

The cold wind pushed me back.

Or

I am on a mission from God

to

God sent me.

While these do not follow the initially-described formulation for a passive voice, rewriting the sentences to a basic subject verbs noun formula make them hit harder. The trick is to ignore the thing that is generally regarded (and you are thinking about before you start writing the sentence) and instead lead a sentence with what is driving the action in that sentence. In both cases, “I” am on my mind when I start writing the sentence, but once the sentence is written it’s clear that “I” was not taking the action and “I” should stop distracting the reader from the action.

References

Mewburn, I. (with Firth, Firth, K., & Lehmann, S.). (2021). Level up Your Essays: How to Get Better Grades at University. NewSouth Publishing.

Wexler, N. (2019). The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–And How to Fix It. Penguin Publishing Group.