The Virtues of the Passive Voice

I said I'd talk about the passive, so here I go.

First: what is the passive? It's one of three voices in English. English verbs have a lot of things that come in threes: three voices, three modes, three moods, three tenses*, three aspects**, and three auxiliary verbs to make the tenses and aspects with (also intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs, another triplet.) These things can combine with each other fairly freely to make up what is generally referred to as the English tense system, yielding things such as "I will have been being seen".

So, the passive is a voice; it contrasts with the active and the middle. ("The what?" I hear you cry. The middle, or middle intransitive - which is yet another attempt to make formal, Greco-Roman grammar terminology fit English. Short form: it's the voice which takes the object of a transitive and makes it the subject of that same verb used intransitively with a causative agent that cannot be expressed, as in "that bread slices easily" or "his novels read quickly" or "she doesn't frighten easily". But I digress. This post is about the passive.)

Second, how do we make a passive? Voice depends upon the assignment of the roles of 'agent', 'patient', and 'recipient'. Thus, in the active voice, a transitive verb has an agent, which is the subject, and a patient, which is the object. A ditransitive verb, which can also become passive, also has a recipient, or benefactor, which is the indirect object. To create a passive sentence, we take the patient and make it the subject, relegating the actor to a prepositional phrase or leaving it out altogether. As I noted above, in the middle voice, the patient is the subject, the agent cannot be expressed at all, and the verb is unaltered while some adverbial modification of manner is nearly always done. In the passive, the verb is altered by

(1) using the auxiliary verb "to be" in the proper tense, aspect, and number and
(2) changing the main verb to its -EN form.

(The -EN form is also called the past participle form; it may well not end in -EN, but that's the name of the form.)

Thus: active: I slice the bread.
middle: The bread slices easily.
passive: The bread is sliced by me.

So, various tenses of the passive:

I buy the books -> the books are bought (by me)
I take the books -> the books are taken (by me)
I read the books -> the books are read (by me)
I bought the books -> the books were bought (by me)
I took the books -> the books were taken (by me)
I read the books -> the books were read (by me)

and so on. Note that the passive can be used with perfect or progressive aspects, or with modal auxiliaries, or with all three:

I will have bought the books -> the books will have been bought (by me)
I had taken the books -> the books had been taken (by me)
I have been reading the books -> the books have been being read (by me)
I could have read the books -> the books could have been read (by me)

In all cases, the tense is on the first verb (unless it's a tenseless modal auxiliary), and the aspectual suffixes and forms follow normally.

progressive: BE + -ING = I am taking them = they are being taken
perfect: HAVE + -EN = I have taken them = they have been taken
perfect progressive: I have been taking them = they have been being taken

Third, then, is why do we use the passive? I will pause so you can shout out "weasel words! avoid responsibility! mistakes were made!"

Seriously. Why do we use the passive? There are a number of very good reasons.

1. When the actor is not known. It can be a stylistic flaw to use "somebody": Somebody shot the president! vs The president was shot. The first focuses far too much of the reader's attention on wondering who "somebody" is.

From Gould's essay:

Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended - that is, either supported or denied - by such a restricted approach.

Or this one:

Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be given tasks of value, and self-–esteem could be found for people on all steps of the IQ hierarchy...

Who will give out these tasks, and who will find this self-esteem?

2. When the actor is unimportant and the result is what counts. In this sentence from Gould's essay:

Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be explained to lay readers...

we begin with an active clause and then go to a passive one in which it is the topic, referring back to the immediately preceding clause, and there is no actor (who can explain it? Mathematicians? Gould himself? Does it matter?).

Another example I heard this morning on NPR:

Interviewer: Thailand has been suffering through a complicated situation. If he can sort it out in two weeks, won't that be a good thing?
Analyst: I doubt it can be sorted out that quickly.

The analyst didn't want to discuss whether the general could or could not sort the situation out; her doubts aren't about him but rather about the situation in general.

3. When the relative value of actor and patient are greatly different: A bus ran over Bob vs Bob was run over by a bus. Or Eddie's recurrent question in "To Have and Have Not": "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" How different that would be in active voice: "Did a dead bee ever bite you?" From Gould's essay:

if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers

Should this read

if only numbers did not frighten them

? Would that be any kind of improvement?

4. When the patient is part of the Topic, not the Comment (this is Information Structure - basically, Topic is old, given, known information - what we're talking about - and Comment is new information - what I have to say about it). Within longer structures such as paragraphs or essays, this sort of structuring makes following the discourse much easier. The passive sentences I quoted from Gould's essay were mainly of that sort:

The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph with an axis for each test.

This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner today.

And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that bias doesn't exist, which is the only issue analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve.

Note in each of these sentence the presence of a demonstrative pronoun (these tests, this theory, this crucial question), which indicates that the subject of this sentence was introduced in the preceding one. Classic Information Structure: Comment becoming Topic.

So - this has been a brief introduction to passive. I'll just close by saying all the sins imputed to the passive voice can be committed by the active, especially avoiding responsibility. But the virtues of the passive belong to it alone.

Don't condemn it just because many style manual writers, often not fully mastering what the passive even is, and just as often using it themselves in their own writing, do.


* three tenses if you stretch the definition and allow the 'future modality' of "will" to be a tense. I will so that I can maintain the symmetry :-)
** again, three if you stretch the definition a tiny bit to include the emphatic as an aspect