What is passive voice?
Passive voice is a grammatical construction where the subject receives the action rather than performing it. In other words, it puts the thing that is being done before the thing that is doing it (such as this sentence). Active voice is when the author starts the sentence or phrase with the thing creating the action, and then how it does the thing or the impact it has. “The ball was thrown through the window” is passive voice, because it describes what happened and does not say who did it. “Kai threw the ball through the window” is active voice because it identifies who performed the action before explaining it.
Useful Passive Voice
Scientists use phrases like “The data was collected” to remove the author from the research, instead focusing on methods and results. This style presents information as impartially as possible, in part to highlight researchers’ methods and conclusions. It also grants the research an air of impartiality that contributes to its air of unbiased reporting of the facts.
Passive voice can also sound quite impressive, with sonorous flourishes that almost beg for a British accent. Saying “These doors were handcrafted for the Jefferson estate from aged oak, embossed with scenes of colonial life” sounds fancy and prestigious, far more so than would “Enslaved people handcrafted these doors for their owner Thomas Jefferson from aged oak….” As a writing technique it is seductive because it sounds great and allows the author to be a bit lazy with clarity.
Problematic Passive Voice
Stylistic Issues
Passive voice fogs clarity because it leaves readers with less information than active voice provides. Using active voice forces more precise work because it requires writers to identify the source of the action, giving readers more information and cutting unnecessary verbiage. Also, passive voice tends to be flowery and verbose, which eats up space and doesn’t impart additional information. Using active voice tightens the flow of the entire piece, leaving writers more room when they are trying to squeeze their ideas into a page/word limit.
Social Implications of Precision
While the ostensible neutrality of passive voice has some excellent uses and can be perfect for some situations, it has another less obvious function of avoiding, occluding, or cloaking the party responsible for the action. For example, politicians famously enjoy the phrase “mistakes were made” because it allows them to acknowledge the mistakes without assigning responsibility to anyone for making said mistakes.
In the social sciences, that is intensely problematic because it is people doing things to other people. Evading the question of who is doing what enables racism, sexism, and other hegemonic forms of injustice. This both grants the actor immunity when their actions are reprehensible, and frames the issue of what should be done about it. (There I just used passive voice to avoid saying who should be doing something, because it let me be lazy and not think that through more carefully so I could be more specific).
For example, if “women are raped,” the subtle linguistic implication is that women need to do something about it – ie. change their clothing, remain sober, avoid public places, etc. When rephased in active voice, “men rape women” frames the next step as men’s responsibility to stop raping women. It also mandates additional clarity, because it can encourage readers to consider who else might be raping women besides men.
The social implications of passive voice really struck me one evening when I was doing the dishes and listening to NPR. They aired a story on police officers who shot Black people, and the reporter said, “Black children are perceived by police as older than their chronological age.” I stopped in mid-scrub, appalled by the linguistic implications. That makes it sound like the Black 8-year-old who has been mistaken for a 14-year-old is responsible for the police officer’s perception!
That is where it gets difficult for social scientists, because it forces us to think about who is making the mistake. It is most likely not other Black police officers mistaking Black children’s ages, because they are around Black kids enough to know what an 8-year-old looks like. The implication here is non-Black officers, and especially white officers — and indeed many/most white people, because we are famously unable to distinguish between and among Black people.
It is no wonder that passive voice is so popular in writing – it helps us sound fancy and takes away all that pesky responsibility for action. Social science writers cannot afford the laziness and haughty tones of passive voice because we cannot in good conscience pretend that the consequences of action just happen and no one is responsible for them. Especially when it comes to social justice, it is crucial to identify the source of the actions we discuss lest they pass as inevitable or invisible. Being vague about the source of the action means that racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism – discrimination in general gets to slide by unnamed when social science authors write in passive voice.
Writing in Active Voice
As an alternative to passive voice, social science writers are better off using active voice which puts the actor before the action. Active voice specifies who is doing what, and both cuts unnecessary verbiage while also assigning responsibility to the agent performing the action. That can be tricky, because it forces writers to think clearly about who is doing what, something that strips away convenient invisibility from things society has taken for granted such as white privilege, compulsory heterosexuality, and other forms of social power that have passed as natural when they are actually socially constructed.