Passive Voice
Long-time readers know that in previous posts I’ve been sprinkling in links to things that I haven’t yet written about—but that I intend to write about—including an as-yet unwritten entry on ending sentences in prepositions—that I’m not linking to. [See what I did there?] Those links to unwritten entries point to the stub entry until their proper entries are completed. Today’s post completes one of those promised posts—the very first one I dropped into the stub entry itself. [layers and layers of useless meta-commentary!]
This Substack is largely text (if you hadn’t noticed), and I have strong opinions about writing that were, in part, formed in the classroom—as a student and later as a teacher. I spent some time teaching writing—back when I thought it would be a good idea to get a PhD in American Literature and pursue an academic career. [NB: It wasn’t.] I paid my way through grad school, as one does, by teaching in the English departments where I was pursuing my degrees.
This is how the Ponzi scheme of the academy works, at least in English: Starry-eyed grad students think they can be professors some day; professors don’t want to teach freshman composition classes; so they pay the grad students a pittance to teach the classes/students they don’t want to teach—freeing the professors to teach whatever esoteric thing their research focuses on.
The problem is that there aren’t actually enough professorships to absorb the glut of over-educated PhDs coming out of the grad programs. So you have a lot of English PhDs who are simultaneously overqualified for everything and yet not qualified for anything (other than culturally aware poetry explication and the like—which is not what you would call a booming industry). At some point, I figured this out and dropped out of grad school, but before then I spent a total of about four and half years teaching at the University of GA and the U of Illinois at Chicago—mostly freshman comp (those writing classes universities require students to take), but also some lit classes, and even a teaching practicum for my fellow grad students.
All of that aside, a common refrain in composition classes is pointing out “passive voice,” which is perhaps not something that most people think about much—except that maybe you had a teacher critique you for using it at some point along the line. Here’s what it is:
The basic structure of a sentence in English is subject-verb. Sometimes we also get an object. The subject does the thing; the verb is the action of the subject does; and the object receives the doing or gives more info about the thing done. That’s an oversimplification (and not strictly accurate—esp. the object part), but this schematization is basically right and makes up in utility what it lacks in accuracy. The passive voice inverts this standard “active voice” structure and puts the object first. So instead of
Ben hit the wall. [subj] [verb] [obj] we get The wall was hit by Ben. [obj] [verb] [subj]
Notice anything when comparing those two? For one thing, the second one, the passive one, requires more words. That’s not always bad, and sometimes you want the object out front and/or to deemphasize the subject. But too much passive voice contributes to wordiness and obfuscation. A good rule of thumb is to use the passive voice only when you can explain your reason for using it. If you don’t have a reason, use active voice: subject-verb-object. Most of the time people don’t realize they’re using passive voice. They slip into it as they’re attempting to articulate something. They’re just…writing.
During my grad school years, I also tutored a software executive in writing and our main focus was identifying the subject, verb, and object in sentences to help him see the underlying structure of his and others’ writing. This helped him cut through the noise of so much writing and more clearly decode text and express himself.
I came up with the subject/verb/object focus by adapting from Richard Lanham’s really helpful book, Revising Prose. I’ve taught this book in formal and informal ways many times over the years. There’s also a charmingly dated video version of it. Years after I first encountered Lanham’s work as an undergrad, my colleagues and I at UIC were able to bring him from LA to Chicago to give a talk and do some panels. It was like meeting a big star for me. Lanham is kind of like those Athens musicians I’ve been gushing about in recent posts: a huge figure in my life but not someone who is “famous.” Funny how that works, but those people, the people who are special to you, even if they aren’t recognized more broadly, those are the really interesting ones. Here’s Lanham’s video:
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