Standard composition textbooks often condemn the passive voice. But can the passive voice facilitate clarity?
The structure of a standard English sentence is actor (subject) + action (verb). The passive verb turns this on its head: the action precedes the actor. The Beatles “She Loves You” can become “you are loved by her.” The second sentence is clumsy and frankly, not particularly romantic.
Using the Passive Voice Badly
Unskilled use of passive sentences suffocates us. This suffocation is evident in scholarly writing. A scholarly legal article begins like this:
Throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, remedies for federal government misconduct were often predicated on rights to sue conferred by such common law forms as trespass, assumpsit, and ejectment.
This seems very complex and arcane. It is not – the problem is how it has been written.
Part of the problem here is the lack of an actor – we just don’t know who is kicking and who has been kicked. We make this plain by making actor a subject, eliminating the passive voice, and inserting the straightforward verb “to say.”
Here, we will make the subject/actor “lawyers”.
My version:
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when lawyers wanted to say that the government had acted illegally, they charged through common law doctrines such as trespass, assumpsit, and ejectment.
So, at times, we can eliminate the passive voice and increase clarity. But there is more.
Clearer Writing Using the Passive Voice: Sentence Transitions
We might want the passive voice if we want to obscure the actor’s identity, or the identity is not important. Nixon’s press secretary Ronald Ziegler once wittily said, “Mistakes were made,” a non-apology apology, carefully eliding who made the mistakes.
But, beyond the need to muddy up who is acting, could there be other uses for the passive? Let us return to our distinguished scholar’s law review abstract. He continues:
But Erie, the law-equity merger, and other factors pushed those common law forms to the side.
There is no connection between the first sentence and the second sentence. In his first sentence, he introduced us to the various common law methods of charging governmental misconduct. But the second sentence begins with a discussion of the Erie doctrine and other factors. So, in 2 sentences, we have 2 different subjects:
- Remedies for allegations of federal government misconduct.
- Erie, the law-equity merger, and other factors.
Given the way the sentences are structured, the relationship between these two is somewhat unclear. We need clarity now, and time is pressing.
The passive voice can help in smoothing transitions between sentences. Could we solve the lack of clarity by putting the second sentence in the passive voice? Let’s see:
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when lawyers wanted to say that the government had acted illegally, they charged through common law doctrines such as trespass, assumpsit, and ejectment. But these common law suits were pushed to the side by Erie, the law-equity merger, and other factors.
Notice even though we are using the passive voice in the second sentence, this version is far more readable. That is because we are reemphasizing the newly introduced idea of “common law doctrines” that occurred at the end of the first sentence at the beginning of the second sentence. Because of this repetition, there is a smoother transition between the two sentences.
We will continue to be clearer if we begin the third sentence with a reference to Erie, the law-equity merger, or other factors. In this way, we will go from already introduced information to new information.
There is a principle here: we can use the passive voice if it harmonizes end-of-sentence information with a reference to or a definition of the same information in the beginning of the next sentence. This will be a recurring point in my posts.
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