Active versus Passive Voice

The most frequently used sentence structure in English is composed of a subject, a verb, and an object. The S-V-O sentence, as it is called, is the most direct way of making a point or stating a fact.

When the verb in the sentence does not express an action, but describes a state of being, the latter part of the sentence is known as the subject complement (SC).

Both of these sentence types are said to be in the active voice: the subject of the sentence is the actor in a mini-drama between the initial capital and the end punctuation, performing an action in the first example, and presenting an emotion in the second.

If we turn these sentences around, make the actor that which is acted upon, we create a sentence in the passive voice:

You can see that these sentences lack the force and directness of the active form. They are also rather clunky and somewhat wordier. While a sentence in the passive voice is not an error in English prose—below you will find examples in which the passive voice is necessary—it nonetheless often results in awkward and lengthy sentence structures. Since it always entails some form of the to be verb (is and was)—the weakest of all the English verbs—the passive sentence presents a point in a rather dull and static way. You get little sense of real activity, and a clunky arrangement of words to boot, in a phrase like "The relief effort was participated in."

While there is no universal rule against using the passive voice, attentive writers avoid constructing sentences in the passive voice unless they have a good reason to do so. The passive sentence lacks the clarity and direction of the active sentence; it lacks a doer of an action. Often it is a sentence in search of a character.

There are, however, some purposes for which the passive is preferred.

Reasons for using the passive voice