When, if ever, do you choose the passive voice?

[AG31]

This morning I posted a question, "What is the best way to construct this sentence?" Several respondents suggested ways to change it from passive to active. Classic. What could be wrong with that? But I was resisting it. Finally I figured out why: My MCs are always the recipients of the action (not at all evident in my post). Not submissive or passive, that's too strong. But not active. So the passive voice reinforces that quality.

I don't have a copy of The Story of O anymore, and am unwilling to spring for Amazon's $14, but my fallible memory tells me that she didn't "feel" the leather car seat against her bare legs, but, rather, the leather car seat was <something> against her bare legs. And she didn't walk from one room to another at Roissy, but, instead, was led.

When, if ever, do you folks use the passive voice, and why?

BTW, much thanks to those in the other thread who brought up the issue of passive vs active. I've struggled for years to articulate why I resist the descriptions of my MCs as "submissive" or "passive." "Recipients of the action," is something I just came up with today and it's the best for me so far.

 

[EmilyMiller]

When, if ever, do you folks use the passive voice, and why?

Submissions to scientific journals were made. It was observed that not all were immediately accepted without revision.

 

[StillStunned]

When the subject of the passive sentence is more important than the actor. "Her hair had been brushed until it shone like gold." "He had been struck by an arrow." "She felt herself being pressed down onto the bed and penetrated by her lover's shaft." (This last one could also be phrased as "Her lover pressed her down onto the bed and she felt his shaft penetrate her." But it shifts the focus away from her perception and gives the sentence a different nuance.)

 

[FrancesScott]

I will write things like:

I was led (your example)

I’m not well versed enough to comment definitively, but is that something different to the science examples above? Is it really passive, or some other construct. Maybe someone more erudite can comment.

I certainly wouldn’t write:

The cock was swallowed by me

And I suspect you wouldn’t either.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

MS Word will always tell you that you are supposed to use active voice only. But that's limiting your language for no good reason. Mix it up depending on the scene. For action or sex scenes, passive voice isn't usually the best choice, but for the description of a landscape or a person, it makes perfect sense.

 

[crookedletter]

When the subject of the passive sentence is more important than the actor. "Her hair had been brushed until it shone like gold." "He had been struck by an arrow." "She felt herself being pressed down onto the bed and penetrated by her lover's shaft." (This last one could also be phrased as "Her lover pressed her down onto the bed and she felt his shaft penetrate her." But it shifts the focus away from her perception and gives the sentence a different nuance.)

Pretty much this, and maybe occasionally for purposes of sentence rhythm, to mix things up.

I don't think about it much first time through. I let myself write in passive voice when I want to write in passive voice. But then on revision you just have to ask yourself why a given sentence uses passive voice. If there's not a ready answer, like in the above, then you can probably improve the sentence by switching to active.

 

[NotWise]

I mix passive voice into my writing for variety in the narrative, sometimes too much. Aside from that, I can't think of a time outside technical writing when I'd prefer passive voice. I like to use active voice even in technical writing, but it can be awkward to claim responsibility for the action described.

 

[THBGato]

Use it when you want to emphasise the object of the sentence.

E.g. consider the difference between


1. "I was assaulted" versus 2. "Jean assaulted me."

In one, our focus and sympathy is on the narrador. In two, we're angry with Jean. Those are different reactions.

Also use it to be more formal.

 

[TheLobster]

When the subject of the passive sentence is more important than the actor. "Her hair had been brushed until it shone like gold." "He had been struck by an arrow."

I'm not sure you can really illustrate the distinction using a single-sentence examples like this. To decide whether passive voice is more adequate, you need, I think, to work at the level of entire passages, to determine if the subject is more of a passive or active participant in the scene.

In a proper context, "Gentle hands brushed her hair until it shone like gold." or "An arrow struck him." (or, of course, "He was an adventurer until he took an arrow in the knee.") could all work very well.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

It can make for great, if subtle, differentiation between characters, especially ones from odd backgrounds - aliens, mystic beasts, dimension hopper, etc. If all the rest of your characters are actively voiced - "Judy did this, Tom felt that" kind of thing - then one that doesn't is a quick difference that can spice the story without having to explain further. Kinda like Yoda with his germanic-style dialog structure, if generally not quite as blatant.

 

[PennyThompson]

In my Mothman story I played around with the contrast between the "Academic Passive Voice," and explicit descriptions of monster-fucking, it seemed to effectively strike a chord for at least a few readers

 

[AG31]

The thing that I see missing from a lot of these "style/technique" threads is a discussion about the effect of the writing on the reader, which I would argue should be the first and last of the considerations for grammar and word selection, as well as sentence structure, length, and placement (and you can extrapolate from there to the paragraph, page, and chapter level).

I want to express myself as accurately as possible, so that like minded people will recognize what I'm doing. In the other thread I was very interested to see how few people accepted that I simply wanted words to describe the thing I'd laid out. Lots wanted me to describe something different. So.... What I'm trying to say is that the effect of the writing on the reader is dependent on the reader's receptivity to what the writer is trying to do. In erotica, especially, the differences among readers are vast.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't have a copy of The Story of O anymore, and am unwilling to spring for Amazon's $14, but my fallible memory tells me that she didn't "feel" the leather car seat against her bare legs, but, rather, the leather car seat was <something> against her bare legs. And she didn't walk from one room to another at Roissy, but, instead, was led.

Here's that sequence, half of the paragraph, at least:

"Undo your garter-belt," he says, "take off your panties." There's nothing to that, all she has to do is get at the hook behind and raise up a little. He takes the garter-belt from her hand, he takes the panties, opens her bag, puts them away inside it; then he says: "You're not to sit on your slip or on your skirt, pull them up and sit on the seat without anything in between." The seat-covering is a sort of leather, slick and chilly; it's a very strange sensation, the way it sticks and clings to her thighs..."

Present tense, active voice, and it describes her sensation, albeit the leather becomes curiously animate, "it sticks and clings to her thighs."

She is later led through Roissy on the leash, but even so, it's active, in the moment, with O fighting the sensations whilst succumbing to them. She might not be willing, but she's not passive. The text describes the things being done to her, as the main character, and they're described from her point of view. A random look elsewhere, the narrative is the same, shifting between present and past tense.

If The Story of O was edited today, with the digital era adage, "Give the readers plenty of white space," in mind, it would read like many other image rich, sensation rich works, where the descriptions are visceral, vivid, sensuous. It's only because the text can go for several pages with no paragraph breaks that it comes across as dense, ponderous. But within each long paragraph, it's not actually like that.

It's a product of the print era, for sure, but if it was formatted differently, it would read with a lighter touch, I think, even if the words were exactly the same.

 

[thunderousexplode]

This morning I posted a question, "What is the best way to construct this sentence?" Several respondents suggested ways to change it from passive to active. Classic. What could be wrong with that? But I was resisting it. Finally I figured out why: My MCs are always the recipients of the action (not at all evident in my post). Not submissive or passive, that's too strong. But not active. So the passive voice reinforces that quality.

I don't have a copy of The Story of O anymore, and am unwilling to spring for Amazon's $14, but my fallible memory tells me that she didn't "feel" the leather car seat against her bare legs, but, rather, the leather car seat was <something> against her bare legs. And she didn't walk from one room to another at Roissy, but, instead, was led.

When, if ever, do you folks use the passive voice, and why?

BTW, much thanks to those in the other thread who brought up the issue of passive vs active. I've struggled for years to articulate why I resist the descriptions of my MCs as "submissive" or "passive." "Recipients of the action," is something I just came up with today and it's the best for me so far.

I used to try and avoid use of the passive in my writing, but I'm a fan of Steven Pinker and when he was promoting

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century ​

I saw him present on writing style. I liked the stuff he was saying and I remember how he talked about the use of the passive in the Wikipedia article about Oedipus Rex (spoilers follow)

Foremost among them is the unfairly maligned passive voice: Laius was killed by Oedipus, as opposed to Oedipus killed Laius. In chapter 2 we saw one of the benefits of the passive, namely that the agent of the event, expressed in the by-phrase, can go unmentioned. This is handy for mistake-makers who are trying to keep their names out of the spotlight and for narrators who want you to know that helicopters were used to put out some fires but don’t think you need to know that it was a guy named Bob who flew one of the helicopters. Now we see the other major benefit of the passive: it allows the doer to be mentioned later in the sentence than the done-to. That comes in handy in implementing the two principles of composition when they would otherwise be stymied by the rigid word order of English. The passive allows a writer to postpone the mention of a doer that is heavy, old news, or both. Let’s look at how this works.


Consider this passage from the Wikipedia entry for Oedipus Rex, which (spoiler alert) reveals the terrible truth about Oedipus’s parentage.


[TR]
[TD]A man arrives from Corinth with the message that Oedipus’s father has died. . . . It emerges that this messenger was formerly a shepherd on Mount Cithaeron, and that he was given a baby. . . . The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child.[/TD]
[/TR]

It contains three passives in quick succession (was given a baby; was given to him; had been told), and for good reason. First we are introduced to a messenger; all eyes are upon him. If he figures in any subsequent news, he should be mentioned first. And so he is, thanks to the passive voice, even though the news does not involve his doing anything: He (old information) was given a baby (new information).

Now that we’ve been introduced to a baby, the baby is on our minds. If there’s anything new to say about him, the news should begin with a mention of that baby. Once again the passive voice makes that possible, even though the baby didn’t do anything: The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd. The shepherd in question is not just newsworthy but also heavy: he is being singled out with the big, hairy phrase another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child. That’s a lot of verbiage for a reader to handle while figuring out the syntax of the sentence, but the passive voice allows it to come at the end, when all of the reader’s other work is done.
her work is done.


Now imagine that an editor mindlessly followed the common advice to avoid the passive and altered the passage accordingly:



[TR]
[TD]
A man arrives from Corinth with the message that Oedipus’s father has died. . . . It emerges that this messenger was formerly a shepherd on Mount Cithaeron, and that someone gave him a baby. . . . Another shepherd from the Laius household, he says, whom someone had told to get rid of the child, gave the baby to him.
[/TD]
[/TR]


Active, shmactive! This is what happens when a heavy phrase with new information is forced into the beginning of a sentence just because it happens to be the agent of the action and that’s the only place an active sentence will let it appear.


The original passage had a third passive—who had been told to get rid of the child—which the copy editor of my nightmares has also turned into an active: whom someone had told to get rid of the child. This highlights yet another payoff of the passive voice: it can unburden memory by shortening the interval between a filler and a gap.

This advice and the Oedipus Rex example led me to completely re-appraise my use of the passive.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

I feel like the business / marketing / plain language movement has pushed active voice on us so much, particularly in the modern schooling environments that it spills over into creative writing more than it ought to. Overly active prose grates me as much as overly passive dulls me.

As Buddha teaches us: in the bedroom of language, neither the dom nor the sub exists without the other. To chain yourself to one or the other is to know only half the pleasure. Find the middle way. Let the whip crack when it must crack and let the silk soften what it must make soft.