I’m not trying to be dramatic. I’m not claiming that passive voice is the go-to tool of oppression or that it represents the downfall of free society. All I’m saying is that one of the many strategies oppressors have at their disposal is to use the passive voice in their writing (or speaking). For this reason, writers should use the passive voice judiciously and always consciously, and readers should watch for it and question its use.
Definition
Let’s start with definitions. Sentences, as you likely know, have at the minimum subjects and verbs. Those two parts of speech are what grant a string of words sentence status. For example, in the sentence Miranda ate a sandwich, Miranda is the subject and ate is the verb. Even if you took out the sentence object, which in this case is the sandwich, you’d still have a sentence:
Miranda ate.
When a sentence or clause (a sentence within a sentence) is constructed in the passive (as opposed to active) voice, instead of initiating the action the subject receives the action. You can spot passive voice by looking for instances of the verb to be (e.g., is, was, were, am, are) + a past participle. A past participle is a verb constructed as if it were in the past tense that operates somewhat like an adjective.
Let’s turn our example sentence into the passive voice:
The sandwich was eaten by Miranda.
Notice how Miranda is not really doing anything now. Yes, the sandwich was eaten by her, but in our sentence she’s not actually eating it. In this example, we would still have a sentence even if we got rid of Miranda:
The sandwich was eaten.
The sandwich is our new subject in this sentence. But note how passive the subject sandwich is. The sandwich isn’t doing anything. It didn’t even do anything in the past. It just sat there on the plate and was eaten.
Generally, you know you’re dealing with passive voice when the subject could be (1) an inanimate object or (2) in a coma, and the action would still happen. In the following examples, the italicized words are prepositional phrases. The subjects are boldfaced.
The mailbox was hit by a car.
The report was prepared by company executives.
The bills are voted on by senators.
The people were enslaved.
The mailbox, report, bills, and people didn’t actively participate in the hitting, preparing, voting, and enslavement; it all just happened to them.
When Passive Voice Makes Sense
Passive voice is not something that is wrong or incorrect to use. In fact, there are plenty of times when using it makes the most sense. For example, if you’re feeling powerless in your life and the latest bad thing that has happened to you is that you have become ill, then you won’t want to write about the illness this way:
The virus infected me.
That sentence takes the focus off you and puts it on the virus. Instead, the passive voice would enable you to further wallow in your sense of despair and victimization:
I was infected by the virus.
When Passive Voice Becomes Dangerous
Passive voice becomes troublesome when people use it to distance themselves or others from a particular action, whether consciously or not, for unhealthy or even nefarious purposes.
Saying, “The key got lost” is a way to avoid taking responsibility for losing the key. Much more serious is a journalist’s article that says, “The people were encouraged to overrun the Capitol.” That sentence mysteriously avoids assigning the action of encouragement to anyone. Maybe the reporter doesn’t know who did the encouraging. In that case, the reporter needs to find out. If the reporter can’t, you have to wonder how the reporter knows that “the people were encouraged.” If there is evidence of the encouragement, then in all likelihood there is evidence of someone doing the encouraging.
When you comes across a situation of passive voice used in a news article, in a speech, in a television ad, or in a social media post, for example, you would be wise to ask questions. You may conclude that passive voice was simply the easiest and perhaps most elegant way to express something. But you may also conclude that, whether out of negligence, willful misrepresentation, or a failure to look deeply, the writer has omitted key information. What is the key information and why has it been left out?
Here’s an example of passive voice used consciously. Imagine that a state’s textbook review board pressures a publisher to instruct the company’s writers to avoid assigning any responsibility for slavery in a history textbook. The ensuing history textbook might read like this:
Staring in the 1600s a massive slave trade developed between the African continent and the Americas. Africans were enslaved by the thousands and taken by ship across the ocean to plantations in the Southern colonies where they were forced to work.
In this textbook passage, no one has responsibility for the slave trade. No one kidnapped people, no one forced them onto boats, no one sold them in markets, no one chained them or whipped them, and no one forced them to work. It was just a thing that happened to black people. If no one did these things, no one is to blame, and, therefore, reparations are unnecessary, and we can avoid altogether any difficult or unpleasant feelings about the legacy of slavery and its root causes.
In other words, one nefarious reason to use passive voice is to obfuscate the truth.
To Be Active or Just Lie There
Like every element of grammar, the passive voice has its use. The purpose of this article is not to discourage use of it; it’s simply to encourage awareness about when and how it’s used. The particular tool of oppression that is the passive voice cannot be used to oppress you if you are aware of it and sensitive to its effect.