by Aaron Gansky @ADGansky

If you’ve been writing long, you’ve heard all the evils of using the passive voice. It sneaks into our prose without permission, and disguises itself among our active sentences like a malevolent chameleon. But unless you teach English classes in all your spare time, there’s a good chance you might not even know what passive voice is, how to identify it, or how to remedy it. Consider that problem solved. Here is passive voice laid bare (if you’ll pardon the passivity of this sentence).

In order to understand passive voice, you must first understand subjects, verbs, and objects. Take a simple sentence: “The car hit the boy.” The subject is the car (because it is the noun doing the action). The boy is the object (because it is receiving the action). Active voice presents actions like this—Doer, action, recipient of action. Passive voice flips these so that the objective noun (here, the boy) becomes the subject of the sentence. “The boy was hit by the car.” In some cases, the doer is often eliminated. “A boy was hit.”

Strictly speaking, passive voice isn’t grammatically incorrect (or even improper, for that matter). Rather, it is a construction that emphasizes the object rather than the subject, and in some cases neglects the subject altogether. Like all things, however, there is an appropriate time and place to use it. Academic papers are notorious for using it, and you’ll see it more often in literary fiction than commercial fiction. Often in  The reason most fiction editors don’t like it is because it often weakens our prose. Readers like action, and with passive voice, the action is usually not emphasized.

The easiest way to fix passive voice is to flip the subject and the object. “The notion that this was a dream was washed away by his tears” becomes “His tears washed away the notion that this was a dream.” Make sense? In some cases, you may need to add a subject. “There was a text message from Sarah, the hot girl from Chemistry” becomes “Sarah, the hot girl from Chemistry, sent her a text.”

If you feel like you need a little more, these links will help you learn more about passive voice.

Gotta love Grammar Girl!

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/active-voice-versus-passive-voice.aspx

Purdue has some good online help as well.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/539/01/

Another good collegiate-level resource.

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/passivevoice.html

In addition to being a loving father and husband, Aaron Gansky is an award-winning novelist and author, teacher, and podcast host. In 2009, he earned his M.F.A in Fiction at the prestigious Antioch University of Los Angeles, one of the top five low-residency writing schools in the nation. Prior to that, he attained his Bachelor of Arts degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from California State University of San Bernardino.

He lives in quiet little town in the high desert of southern California with his family.