Get Active!

Okay, today I’m getting on my soapbox and railing about one of academic writing’s biggest super villains: The passive voice. Get ready, because I’m about to go all schoolmarm on your ass.

Passive constructions are the bane of academic writing. They are evil leeches that drain the energy and life from your prose. Yet you can pick up any academic journal, and I guarantee it’s awash in them. Still, everyone writes them, including passive voice haters like me. I’m constantly going through my drafts and removing passive constructions that slip in. They are inevitable because we so thoroughly marinate in the passive voice that it eventually seeps into our pores and entwines itself in our writing. So, while it’s hard to avoid writing passive constructions, we can still endeavor to eradicate them when found. But to eradicate them, you have to first recognize them. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Writing Center, provides some useful guidance on identifying passive constructions. So, at the risk of triggering your sophomore English class sentence diagramming PTSD, here’s how you do it:

Sentences using the active voice have a subject doing something to an object via an active verb; thus, the subject typically appears early in sentence and the object appears later, with the active verb in between. Sentences using the passive voice employ passive verbs (varieties of “to be”) and a past participle; further, the object appears early in the sentence (i.e., the object of the action becomes the grammatical subject of the sentence) while the subject appears later, or not at all. Verb forms of “to be” include is, are, am, was, were, has been, have been, had been, will be, can be, will have been, and being. A participle is an active verb usually ending with an -ing (present participle) or -ed (past participle) that is used as an adjective (i.e., to modify a noun, as in “laughing man” or “haunted eyes”). Not all past participles have -ed endings, though; for example, drunk, driven and thought are the past participles of irregular verbs where the -ed ending doesn’t work (e.g., drinked, drived, and thinked). You okay? Still with me?

So, “We surveyed 442 cannabis dispensary owners” is active: there is a clear subject early in the sentence (the pronoun “we”), an active verb (surveyed) followed by the action’s object (cannabis dispensary owners). “Five hundred cannabis dispensary owners were surveyed” is passive: the object (cannabis dispensary owners) appears early in the sentence, followed by the “to be + past participle” combo (were surveyed) and the subject - whomever did the surveying - is MIA. Sentences that start with “It” also typically employ the passive voice (“It can be seen that…,” “It is well known that…”). Whenever you see one of these little buggers, rephrase it; put the actor doing the acting up front, use active verbs, and keep the object the subject is acting on in its place. Doing so enhances your writing’s motion and energy.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Don’t get too hung up on chasing down passive constructions when you are in the throes of writing, particularly when you are writing your first draft. However, as you revise and copy edit, be ever vigilant for these energy sucking bastards, and blow them away with the power of your active voice.