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 Some fee ranges may be outdated or inflated.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 Some fee ranges might be outdated or inflated.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.

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Last time we looked at compound subjects. This time we look at hard-to-find subjects. Read the first cell of this comic:

What’s the subject? It’s “last,” not “tulips”! Liv got it right.

We often add information about the subject of a sentence before we get to the verb, and that information doesn’t have to agree in number with the subject it’s referring to. Sometimes that information can be lengthy, and the subject, especially if it’s nondescript (such as Liv’s “last”), is easy to get lost. The temptation is to make the verb agree with the closest noun, so be careful.

Sometimes you don’t even have a nice neat noun for a subject, either. Look at this, from a recent Gizmag article:

But what exactly is going on beneath the atmosphere’s chaotic exterior is a question that has mystified astronomers for some time.

I made the main verb bold so you could find it. What’s its subject? It’s “what exactly is going on beneath the atmosphere’s chaotic exterior,” a noun clause with its own verb.

Finally (for now, anyway) the subject doesn’t always come before the verb. You already know this is common in questions (Do you not?) But sometimes the subject comes after the verb for effect. Here’s another sentence from the same article:

“Jupiter’s rotation once every 10 hours usually blurs radio maps, because these maps take many hours to observe,” says study co-author Robert Sault, from the University of Melbourne.

Putting the stuff about Jupiter’s rotation first has more punch than starting out with “Robert … says.”

The technical term is subject-verb agreement. This means that if you have a plural subject, you need a plural verb form. Singular subject gets a singular verb. Third grade stuff. But sometimes it’s easy to get agreement wrong. The biggest pitfall is when you have a compound (more than one) subject. (The second pitfall is when you’re not sure what the subject is; you have so much stuff between the subject and its verb, you lose track. We’ll get to that in another post (ahem) the next one.)

Here’s the rule when you have more than one subject: If they’re joined by “and,” use a plural verb. If they’re joined by “or,” agree with the subject closest to the verb.

Planes, trains, and automobiles are types of transportation.

A plane, a train, and an automobile are in your display of transportation toys.

Trains, planes, or an automobile gets you there.

A train, a plane, or two automobiles get you there.

And now, a curve!

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the name of a movie.

If the subject is a single entity, no matter what its form, it’s singular. You have to think!

Now an exercise for you. I found this sentence on the website of a place where I used to have a job, many years ago.

A welcome stop along the Glacial Ridge Trail, the Terrace Mill and the Terrace Mill Historic District features a 1903 Vintage Flour Mill, Keystone Arch Bridge, Weir Dam, Mill Pond, Log Cabin, and a Heritage Cottage.

Is the sentence correct or not?

I hardly ever get comments to this blog, but I posted a link to one of my posts on Google+ the other day, and a friend made a comment that’s not only worth repeating, but it deserves a post! Go follow the link if you want to see the cause for the comment. Here’s his comment:

I think I get it right most of the time…but still have a hard time saying, “Whom do you think you are!?”….the other thing you taught me and I keep forgetting is where the quote marks go in a sentence…not sure I got it right above…

Lorin Walker (a former boss, by the way, and still a friend) says he has trouble saying “whom do you think you are?” Well, he should have trouble saying that, but not for the reason he thinks! We usually put the subject first in English, and the nominative (subject) form of the word is indeed “who.” So we’re used to putting “who” at the beginning of a sentence.

With questions, however, the subject generally doesn’t come first, the object does, and that’s where “whom” comes in. So you generally start a question with “whom.” Except for one thing: the type of verb.

Remember predicate nominatives? They look like direct objects, except they go with linking verbs (mainly some form of “to be” but also other verbs that are equivalent to an equals sign, such as seem and appear.) So in Lorin’s example sentence, the first word goes with (is the predicate nominative of) the last word, “are”! He could say “Who do you thing you are?” with impunity, and be so correct that he’d fool a lot of amateur grammar nazis.

PS: I just now saw a headline, in the Los Angeles Times, no less:

Who does your member of Congress support for president?

Lynn Margulis, a famous evolutionary biologist died recently. Here’s a sentence from an article about her.

 She was also a major contributor to the Gaia theory, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating complex system, and was once married to astronomer Carl Sagan.

Lynn Margulis

The rule in English is that you never separate a subject from its verb with an odd number of commas. This sentence has a compound predicate, so you have a subject and verb before you get to the first comma. So the sentence is grammatical as it stands.

I’ll get into this more in a future post about the sin of pretentiousness in writing, but you need to have a comma before “which.” “Which” and what comes after it is really an aside, supplying extra information about the Gaia theory.

After the second comma you find a verb but no subject. What’s the subject? Normally you go back to the first suitable noun, in this case, Earth. Carl Sagan was an unusual person, but I doubt the earth was married to him! That second comma to the rescue—it ends the aside and makes you jump clear to the front of the sentence.She and Carl were married. Still a pretty interesting situation, but at least possible.

Editorial comment: That aside is so long, it somewhat separates the second verb from its subject, even with the comma. Maybe they should have changed that last comma to a period and made a second sentence starting with “She.”