Passive voice, like active, can occur in any tense: past ( was discovered), present ( is discovered), future ( will be discovered), present perfect ( has been discovered), present progressive ( is being discovered) and so on. "The passive voice puts the cart before the horse: the object of the action first, then the harnessing verb, running backwards, then the driver forgotten, and the whole contraption at a standstill." So writes Sheridan Baker (who can always be counted on for a colourful quip) in my battered fifth edition of The Practical Stylist (1981). Active to passive voice converter software online driver# This backwardness is part of the problem. Because passive voice reverses the logical progression of ideas, it can make those ideas hard to follow, especially when they are complex or technical.
Another strike against passive voice is the wordiness that inevitably accompanies it. These weaknesses combine to form overgrown jungles of prose, which we can prune considerably by converting to active voice. Consider this example:ĪCTIVE The findings of this survey on online dating will appear in the next issue of TechnoGeek Quarterly. It’s easy to become dogmatic about passive voice, to thump our desks and insist on purging every instance of it from our writing. Indeed, some writers go to extraordinary lengths to do just that, with little regard to context or flow. But truly understanding passive voice means acknowledging that there’s room for it in clear writing-if we use it sparingly, and for effect.Īs we’ve seen, passive voice puts emphasis on the recipient or product of an action, which is sometimes precisely where we want the emphasis to be. In this case a passive construction serves better: "The Hart and Heath was renovated in 1997." If, for instance, we’re partway into a profile of our neighbourhood pub, we might not want to write "Jeremiah Jessop and Sons renovated the Hart and Heath in 1997" because it yanks the focus away from the pub. Passive voice is also useful when we don’t know the identity of the person or thing performing the action. Passive voice is likewise appropriate when we don’t care who or what is doing the action: "A flag will be raised in honour of Lori’s synchronized swimming triumph." What to doĪ reporter covering an act of arson would do well to write "The fire was started sometime around midnight," to convey that the action was deliberate but the actor is (as yet) unknown. Writing, no matter how we dissect it, remains an art, not a science. Active to passive voice converter software online driver#įor that reason it’s pointless to prescribe some ideal ratio of passive to active voice.
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