Most Advice About the Passive Voice Is Wrong
Ask a room of confident writers to mark the passive constructions in a paragraph and you will get a strange result: most of the things circled are not passive at all.
What gets circled is usually anything that feels limp — sentences with was in them, sentences with abstract subjects, sentences that are simply long. The rule has drifted from a grammatical category into a vague feeling about weak prose, and in the process it has become both unfalsifiable and useless.
What the passive actually is
A passive construction has two ingredients: a form of be (or get) plus a past participle. The thing receiving the action becomes the subject of the sentence.
- Active: The committee approved the proposal.
- Passive: The proposal was approved by the committee.
- Passive, agent omitted: The proposal was approved.
That is all. Things commonly mistaken for it:
- The building is old. — adjective after a linking verb, not passive.
- She was running. — past continuous, not passive.
- There were three options. — existential there, not passive.
- The results were disappointing. — participial adjective, not passive.
If you cannot add by somebody to the end, it is almost certainly not passive.
The kernel of truth
The advice exists because of a real problem: the passive can hide who did something.
Mistakes were made. By whom? The construction lets the sentence be complete without ever saying. That is why it flourishes in political statements, incident reports and corporate apologies — it is the grammar of not quite admitting things.
Where a reader needs to know who acted, the passive can conceal it. That is a genuine failure, and it is what the rule was originally warning about. Somewhere along the way the warning about hiding the agent became a blanket prohibition on a grammatical structure, which is a much larger and much less defensible claim.
Four times the passive is the right choice
When the receiver is the subject of your paragraph. English puts given information first and new information last. If you are writing about a bridge, the bridge was completed in 1974 keeps the bridge where the reader expects it. Workers completed the bridge in 1974 introduces workers you will never mention again.
When the agent is unknown or irrelevant. My bike was stolen. You do not know who took it, and somebody stole my bike is not an improvement.
When the agent is obvious. The suspect was arrested on Tuesday. Adding by police tells the reader nothing.
When convention requires it. Scientific method sections are passive by design: the samples were heated to 60°C. The identity of the person holding the flask is deliberately irrelevant, because the point is that anyone repeating the procedure would get the same result.
The advice that would actually help
Replace avoid the passive with a question: does the reader need to know who did this?
If yes, and the sentence does not say, fix it. If no, the passive is doing its job.
This version is better in three ways: it can actually be applied, it identifies the real fault, and it does not require anyone to first learn what a past participle is.
A note on grammar checkers
Most word processors flag passive constructions and suggest rewriting. They are pattern-matching, not judging whether the agent matters — and they routinely flag the four legitimate cases above.
Treat the flag as a prompt to check, never as a verdict. A document with zero passive constructions has usually been damaged in the process of achieving that.
What is usually wrong instead
When a sentence feels weak and the passive gets blamed, the actual culprit is normally one of these: a verb that is doing no work (conduct an investigation instead of investigate), a noun made out of a perfectly good verb (the implementation of instead of implementing), or a subject so abstract that nothing in the sentence can be pictured.
Fix those and the prose gets stronger whether or not a single passive survives.
Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.
