Andrew P. Connors

In my last post, I noted that passive voice should not be your “friend,” but that you should have a casual acquaintance with it.  By that, I meant that you should not use passive voice often, although in some situations it is, in fact, preferable to use over active voice.  This advice naturally gives rise to at least two additional questions.  First, “What is passive voice?,” and second, “When is it a good idea to use passive voice?”  I’ll deal with the former question in this post and leave the latter question for another day.

Passive voice is an elusive concept for many writers, especially legal writers.  A sentence is in passive voice when the verb in the sentence acts upon the subject of the sentence.  For example, “The man was arrested,” is written in passive voice.  It often includes a form of the verb “to be.”  To change the sentence to active voice, we might write, “The police arrested the man.”  As you can see, by writing the sentence in active voice, the sentence has a certain immediacy to it that was absent before.  Moreover, by changing the sentence to active voice, all the actors in our world that we are writing about are clearer to the reader.

I’ll explore the nuances to these concepts in the weeks to come.