Why to avoid the Passive Voice

Perhaps the most famous statement in the passive was “Mistakes were made.” (Which has become a common saying, but the first use appears to be in Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union address, in reference to the Iran-contra scandal.)

People use the passive to depersonalize something or to avoid mentioning who did whatever the sentence is talking about. In other words, avoid responsibility. Instruction manuals are notorious for using the passive. Stuff like this:

The flange is fastened with three screws.

When they mean

Fasten the flange with three screws.

Or maybe they meant (how do you tell? You can’t.)

To ensure that the flange won’t come off, we used three screws to fasten it.

Here’s another one I see with some regularity:

Donations are appreciated.

Besides being a way to avoid responsibility, the passive is not as clear as a sentence in the active voice. Recently I read an interesting article in Priceonomics about why some people claim such high fees for giving a speech. The article started with a list of speakers and their fees. At the end, they had this:

Fees are gathered mainly from the websites of speaking agencies. Some fee ranges may be outdated or inflated.

Who does the gathering? He used the present tense, which applies to actions that are customary. Is this how the general public does it? It turned out that in this case the writer was referring to himself, and how he built the table. He should have said something like this:

I gathered the fees for this table mainly from the websites of speaking agencies. Some fee ranges might be outdated or inflated.

Now you have a nice reference that tells you the source of the information, and you know he didn’t talk to a lot of these speakers directly.