Young Writers Society

Avoiding the Passive Voice

This is actually a subject area that I’ve only really recently fully understood. I used to over-use the passive voice, and this really damaged my fiction. And as I’ve seen a number of other members here over-using the passive voice in their stories, I figured I’d write a short article on it.

So - and this is what I imagine a number of people may be asking - what is the passive voice?

Well, it’s kindda hard to explain… read the Wikipedia article on it and you’ll be left scratching your head. So, instead of trying to describe what the passive voice is, instead I’m just going to explain what it does, why it’s bad, and how to avoid it.

The passive voice takes the emphasise away from the action, causing the reader to feel detached from the story (and often, bored as well). For example, the passive voice could be: Jack began to climb the hill, whereas the active (good) version would be: Jack climbed the hill. It may be hard to tell if there is any significant difference between the two when only comparing a single sentence, but when the passive voice infiltrates an entire story, the effects build up and worsen (and can ruin a perfectly good story).

The following make up the passive voice:

- ‘ing’ verbs. You don’t want too many verbs ending with ‘ing’. Words such as ‘climbing,’ ‘crying,’ ‘begging,’ (etc) are naturally more passive than their ‘ed’ counterparts (‘climbed’, ‘cried’, ‘begged’). ‘He was ambling along,’ is passive, whereas active would be: ‘He ambled along.’

- ‘Starting to’ words. Often you may include unnecessary words before a character does something that detract from the story, rather than adding (such as my Jack example above). Phrases such as: ‘began to,’ ‘started to,’ (etc). You don’t need to say a person began to do X - just say he did X.

- Inactive verbs. ‘Was,’ ‘were,’ ‘are,’ ‘is.’ Don’t say: ‘There were five soldiers standing in front of him,’ but rather: ‘Five soldiers stood in front of him.’ The ‘there were’ is completely unnecessary, detracts from the sentence, and also naturally leads onto ‘ing’ verbs.

- Unnecessary adverbs. These are words that describe a verb, but are completely unnecessary. For example: ‘He walked quickly,’ would be passive (most passive adverbs end with ‘ly’). It would be much better to remove ‘quickly’ and replace ‘walked’ with a stronger verb that conveyed the same meaning, such as: ‘He strode.’ Of course, adding a passive adverb onto an ‘ing’ verb is even worse (‘He was walking quickly’).

‘Ted was walking slowly along down the road, minding his own business, when something happened. People began to appear all around him, coming out of thin air. Confused, he began to spin around, wondering where all the people had come from.’ - Passive voice (bad).

‘Ted ambled down the road, minding his own business. Groups of people appeared around him, out of thin air. Confused, he spun around. Where had they come from?’ - Active voice (good).

*raises hand*

Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. I overuse the passive tense a LOT, which is okay in some scenes, but not through the whole book...

Gotta say, t'is a great article you've written here. Very useful.

Any questions on this, I'll know who to come to.

Kay

Hahaha... but, at the same time, if you make everything active, then it's annoying to read. The passive tense can be used in AMAZINGLY good ways. Obviously, you're not going to want to have every single friggin' sentence in the passive tense. But if you put every sentence in the active tense, then it reads like a "Dick and Jane" book. "She did this... he did that." Nobdoy wants to read that as a story. That's just boring. Instead, you're going to want to mix them together in a pretty way. How? You have to decide that.

Another note: depending who the narrator of the story is, you can vary the amount of passive and active depending on who the chartcer is. So in FREAK, I used an obscenely amount of passive description to describe what the freak did. Why? Because she is a passive character. So you can do that to make your story richer and prettier.

...hahah. Yeah. I love arguing.

Thanks for that I've just been getting into what passive voice is, and though I know what it is, it's impossible for me to stop using. I really need to just go 'look for passive voice' or 'look for boring adjectives' and edit just for that at that time. Maybe that would help?

Thank you for the nice article. It explained PV better than most places.

I do that a lot without realising and I hate having to rewrite. I leave it in for my brother to spot them.

Wonderful topic. I tend to do a mixture of both because like Snoink said, it is weird to read a story that is all in active or passive. I think I've found out what my mix is? It seems to come naturally for me, at least with this new story that I'm writing right now. (I haven't posted it or revealed it to anyone yet). So we'll have to see when I post it if I do this well!

I personally don't understand the bias against the passive voice that's present especially in the English language. In German, the only other language which i speak fluently, there's nothing wrong with using passive in order to describe events, especially because German lacks the progressive. I'm not saying that it should be used all the time, but there's nothing wrong with using it now and again, especially when it actually fits.

Thanks for this. I use passive voice far too much, especially the adverb thing.

As Snoink and nerdpony mentioned, passive voice can be very effective if used correctly, but overuse is what kills a story.