Passive Aggressive

A professor once told me in a moment of frustration, brought on by reading too many English 101 papers, that freshman “don’t know their passive from a hole in the ground.”

I can still see her scrawling across the paper she was grading, “For clarity in your writing, focus on using active voice instead of passive.” When the student got the paper back, he probably took one look and went out for a beer. After all, the whole passive/active thing is hard to wrap your head around when you have no fermented barley and hops in your bloodstream.

Because I was young and impressionable, I latched onto the professor’s outrage and developed a tendency to be passive aggressive. By that I mean I get a little aggressive when someone changes my copy from active voice to passive voice.

This is active voice: Malia adores her husband Steve.

This is passive voice: Steve is adored by Malia.

Malia is the actor or agent in this sentence, the person/subject doing the action, so the initial emphasis should be on her. Steve is the object or recipient of Malia’s action, so to speak. Hubba, Hubba

This is even worse passive voice: Steve is adored. It’s worse because it begs the question by whom?

This is still passive voice: Steve is adored by many women.

This is active voice: Many women adore Steve. It also begs a question, but not one related to grammar: Does Malia know and is she OK with it?

If, unlike me, you are a big fan of passive voice, you might have a future in the Oval Office. Wikipedia says the passive phrase “Mistakes were made” was used by* Ulysses S. Grant in 1876, by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and by Bill Clinton in 1997, inspiring the labels “past exonerative tense” and “past evasive tense.” Clearly, using the passive voice comes in handy for acknowledging error, but deflecting responsibility for having made a mistake.

As American journalist Sidney J. Harris was once quoted as saying, "We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice--that is, until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'"


Whew, that's some heady stuff. Is it time for a beer yet?

*"Used by," as used here, is also passive.