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Choosing Passive Voice



Contributors:April Toadvine, Allen Brizee, Elizabeth Angeli
Last Edited: 2010-04-17 05:40:01

Choosing Passive Voice

While active voice helps to create clear and direct sentences, sometimes writers find using an indirect expression is rhetorically effective in a given situation, so they choose passive voice.

Also, writers in the sciences conventionally use passive voice more often than writers in other discourses. Passive voice makes sense when the agent performing the action is obvious, unimportant, or unknown or when a writer wishes to postpone mentioning the agent until the last part of the sentence or to avoid mentioning the agent at all. The passive voice is effective in such circumstances because it highlights the action and what is acted upon rather than the agent performing the action.

Active Passive
The dispatcher is notifying police that three prisoners have escaped. Police are being notified that three prisoners have escaped.
Surgeons successfully performed a new experimental liver-transplant operation yesterday. A new experimental liver-transplant operation was performed successfully yesterday.
"Authorities make rules to be broken," he said defiantly. "Rules are made to be broken," he said defiantly.

In each of these examples, the passive voice makes sense because the agent is relatively unimportant compared to the action itself and what is acted upon.
