FRESHMAN COMPOSITION, RHETORIC, GRAMMAR II

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INTRO. TO LITERARY RESEARCH & WRITING

INSTRUCTOR: James Maxfield

Active Voice: When the subject (person or entity) creates an action and the receiver or goal of the action is the direct object.

Example: The instructor graded the papers.

Passive Voice: Occurs when

--the goal of the action becomes the subject of the sentence,

--the action is expressed (usually in past tense) with a "be" verb form preceding the main verb,

--the subject of the action is either deleted or appears within a prepositional by-phrase.

Example: The papers were graded by the instructor.

Or you can omit agent/actor by deleting the by-phrase:

The kicker scored the field goal. (active)

The field goal was scored by the kicker. (passive)

The field goal was scored. (passive with agent deleted)

Sometimes sentences feel flat or passive even when they are in the active voice. This usually results when the verb is converted into a noun. This is called nominalization. This is often easily recognized by words ending in tion, ness, and ess. Examples

Can you think of other examples?

Writing becomes especially weak when a sentence feels passive. This is caused when nominalizations are combined with a passive construction as in the next example:

The creation of passive sentences was indicated by many teachers as poor writing technique.

1--When it is not important to know or you don’t know who is doing the action; or when the writer purposely intends to obscure ore de-emphasize the agent/subject. This creates distance or detachment. (See "objective passive"). Or if you want to emphasize the object rather than the subject.

Example: It was argued that the tenants had conspired against the landlord.

2--When the subject of your sentence leads with information the ended the preceding sentence to establish continuity. This is called cohesion or having a sense of flow in your writing.

Example: (1) subject A + active verb + new information B.

(2) Previous information B + passive verb + new information C.

Theory: Repeating the new information from the end of one sentence at the beginning of the next helps the reader to logically connect the sentences and your ideas. The sentences within a paragraph should feel like they have a natural flow from one to the next. Readers like to begin a sentence with familiar information from the preceding sentence; they expect new information at the end of the sentence as a logical consequence of the old information. Using the passive voice in a sentence to maintain cohesive flow more than compensates for the loss of action.

3—If using the active voice would alter the intended point of view of the sentence or paragraph.

Objective Passive constructions use the passive voice and frequently change the point of view from first person (I, We) to third person (he, she, it, one, they, this, that, their). This is often used in scientific writing and to a lesser extent in some forms of business ("officialese"), legal writing ("legalese"), and journalism ("journalese") to give the effect or appearance of objectivity:

Example: The economy suffered as a result of the increase in interest rates.

"Rule of thumb" for passive constructions. Normal writing is about 1/3 passive. Writing essays or papers of argument or exposition will have between 10% to 20% passive sentences— usually the minimum needed for effective cohesion and continuity. Assess your use of passive sentences by checking the readability statistics in your computer spell-check.

Caution: Using the passive voice can create dangling modifiers at the beginning of a sentence:

Example: Attracted to his new composition, the young composer was hailed as the next Mozart.

Send mail to james.maxfield@tri-c.edu with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2005 Cuyahoga Community College
Last modified: 04/30/06