Avoiding the "passive voice" .... really?

[HavinAThink]

When I write documents for work, Microsoft Word underlines, and tells me I should "consider revising", sentences that are in the passive voice (e.g. HR will be the first department to be provided with the new ID cards).

Normally I ignore it, but today I googled it, and it turns out many people (though possibly just in the US) have been told by their teachers and lecturers that good writing uses the active voice not the passive voice.

Surely that's bollocks? My DCs were taught the difference between the active and passive voice, but as far as I know they weren't told that one is superior to the other, and neither was I when I was at school.

I'm about to change my MS Word settings so I don't need to be bothered by it again. AIBU?

Oh dear, I've just realised I should have said 'I write fiction when...'

Perhaps I should give it up and do something else less anxiety inducing.

The unreasonableness was done by you

MissWilmottsGhost indeed. The passive voice is certainly not inferior, and it very much has its place, both in academia and the rest of the world.

• I work in academia/STEM. Scientific journals articles and reports are always written in the passive voice. Active voice is not accepted.

That's not true any more. Having been taught at school that lab reports should be written impersonally (the experiment should be reproducible by anyone), I rather regret it.

www.internationalscienceediting.com/active-versus-passive-voice-scientific-writing/

I'm currently reading The Master, by Colm Toibin, and my (probably poor) impression is that it's written mainly in the passive voice.

Part of my job involves delicate negotiations with customers. Mainly because I am attempting to wrestle large sums of money out of them to get them to pay their overdue invoices. I use 'passive' over the phone and in emails.
A lot.

Not sure about the passive voice being 'better'. It is preferable, if you are writing in plain English. This is because active voice doesn't (shouldn't) create any confusion or lead to any doubt as to who is involved.

The meaning of a sentence might seem obvious to you. But there's a lot of the population who struggle with literary or have difficulty with reading comprehension. There's a multitude of reasons why it might not make sense to people. So if you want to take all ambiguity out of your writing, you need to make most of it the active voice.

The passive voice certainly has it's place. That fact is recognised in plain English.

You will be prosecuted.

Has most impact than:

will prosecute you.

Apparently.

Can we can a "Passive Threads" option too please? :)

Of course the passive voice has its place (it would have died out if not).

Sadly that place is not the way that my infuriating exP uses it. He’s a passive aggressive arse who finds the passive voice incredibly useful both in implying blame for others and absolving himself of any.

I write and edit a lot of customer leaflets for work and I am always changing things into the active voice. If you are telling people what they need to do then "You must apply by the end of the month" is far clearer than "The application must be made by the end of the month".
I have written this into the style guide but no other bugger sticks to it! I think a lot of people either don't really understand the difference, or don't care! But I will fight on!

I teach show not tell for specific things, such as introducing characters. I do work through specific examples with them first. Totally agree that a mix of both is needed. Also interesting that almost all of my Year 7 class could parrot "show don't tell", but none of them could actually do it 😂😂😂

As a lawyer the passive voice is crucial in some documents, and obscures meaning in others. It depends what you are trying to do, but there are various contractual terms which have been interpreted many times in a passive voice and so are clear, and have accepted meanings. If the active versions haven't been litigated I will stick with those which I know how they will be interpreted. Everything is about context.

I was taught at law school in the late 90's to use the active voice so it been a thing in business writing for a while.

In my current role I am always correcting passive voice writing as people seem to think it's more formal but it's less direct and full of ambiguity

I work in academia/STEM. Scientific journals articles and reports are always written in the passive voice. Active voice is not accepted.

That's not true any more. Having been taught at school that lab reports should be written impersonally (the experiment should be reproducible by anyone), I rather regret it.

I’ve got to disagree with this. Use of the active voice as in “Previous studies have used x” instead of “x has been used by previous studies” (one of the examples you linked to), fine, but lab reports should always be written impersonally. I work in industry rather than academia, maybe something has changed there? But no one reviewing documents in my work place would accept “I incubated the sample for 3 hours” in place of “the sample was incubated for 3 hours”. It would read very unprofessionally and look like something written by a school child.

Sorry, bold fail!

cariadlet - good post.

Passive voice is neither good nor bad - it's just a question of using what's appropriate and most effective for your purpose.

Northstar - I work in industry, but recently coauthored a paper. I wrote the first draft as I'd done in papers during my PhD - entirely impersonally. My co-author (and manager) who has written a lot more papers than me wanted this changed - 'we ...', 'our study...'. Maybe it's an American thing.

You have blown my mind, I had forgot this from GCSE English! Suddenly I know why certain emails irrationally annoy me ;)

While I completely agree that one is not better than the other, the OP was about business writing and I'd say that active is going to be better 99% of the time for business messages. Not least because the more direct you are, the shorter the message (usually).

I work with people who routinely spend two hours a day managing emails; if I can get everyone in that organisation to reduce email length by 20% (while still preserving clarity of course) then that's a lot of time saved.

Lonny - I'm intrigued by what you say on emails. It's an old witticism (Voltaire?) but it usually takes me longer to write a short email rather than a long one - I express my thoughts then can spend ages editing it to try to make it clearer and more succinct, including eliminating clunky passives.

There was a paper by Christopher Turk back in the 70s “Smith and Brown” comparing reactions to the same piece of science written up in both styles. The paper showed that academics all thought they had to write in the passive tense because that was what was expected to sound “professional”, but they all preferred to read the active tense and in fact thought the scientist that wrote up in active tense was a better scientist! However, the academic world evolves at a glacial pace, it will take decades to change.

I am also on a mission to eliminate passive tense from our SOPs and other business documents (“press button X, turn knob Y”, NOT “button X should be pressed....”) but as a pp said, it’s an uphill battle.

Neither is better- it depends what you are trying to express and what you want the reader to focus on. People often object to passive constructions because they can be used to obfuscate or avoid responsibility ("Mistakes were made..." etc) and that's fair enough. In other situations, however, passives make the meaning clearer by focusing the reader's attention on the action rather than the agent. A well known example from the linguist Geoffrey Pullen is:

"Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires."

All the salient information is given- it's of no import who flew the helicopters so to change this to an active "Bob Smith and Fred Jones flew helicopters in..." actually makes the text harder to read.

A very good book on this subject is The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker. Don't pay any attention to what Microsoft Word tells you: use your own judgement.

Ah funnelfanjo that’s an interesting point because whilst all our reports are written in the passive voice I did revise a whole load of SOPs to make them easier to follow, which involved turning a lot of passive instructions (eg the vial should be placed...) into active (eg place the vial). Didn’t even think of that when I wrote my first post!

But you could just say ‘helicopters flew in to put out the fires’. Or if you really want to emphasise the fires: ‘to put out the fires, helicopters flew in’.

The pedantry that helicopters don’t fly themselves doesn’t matter because we don’t care who flew them. You don’t need the passive voice to achieve your aims.

It depends if you want to give the impression that whoever gives out the passes is an all powerful authority. Sometimes you do. So then 'the passes will be given to HR first' is what you want because obviously this is a done deal by the Man (sic) Upstairs.

@butchyrestingface don't you mean 'I am enamoured of the passive voice'? [Wink]