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One piece of advice new writers hear a lot is to avoid the passive voice. It’s right there in Strunk & White, rule number 14: “Use the active voice.” What many citers of this rule ignore is that they go on to say that, while the active voice is more “direct and vigorous” than passive:

This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

So when can you use passive voice, when should you use active voice, and why does it matter? Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Grammatical Voice, Anyway?

Voice shows the relation between an event and its participants—or, in grammatical terms, between the verb and its subject or object. Passive and active aren’t the only options, though they’re the most common (and the only ones used in English).

In English, voice is shown through the use of syntax (e.g. word order) and prepositions. We’ll focus on that for now and save the linguistics nerd discussion of other types of voice in other languages until the end of the article.

Active voice means the subject of the sentence is the agent of the verb—in other words, the one doing or causing the action. This is shown by putting the subject first in the main clause, followed by the verb, with any objects (recipients or targets of the action) last in the sentence construction.

Some examples of active voice sentences:

• The storm killed five people.
• Yesterday at the beach, I ate the fish.
• Though John doesn’t like milk, he loves cheese.

Notice the subject isn’t necessarily the first word in a sentence, even when it’s active. The complexity or length of a sentence has nothing to do with whether it’s passive or active, even though active sentences are often shorter and simpler than their passive version. What makes a sentence active is that the agent of the action and the subject of the sentence are the same.

In a passive construction, the subject of the sentence is on the receiving end of the action. Let’s put those example sentences in passive voice as an example:

• Five people were killed by the storm.
• Yesterday at the beach, the fish was eaten by me.
• Though milk is not liked by John, cheese is loved by him.

All of these sentences describe the same actions or information as their active voice counterparts, but in a different way. Looking more closely at the first sentence, for example, the same five people are dead, and from the same source—the difference is which information the reader is given first, and the level of agency or responsibility ascribed to the subject.

Now when we talk about “passive” versus “active” voice, this is strictly referring to the grammatical structure, not the level of activity in a sentence. If the first example sentence were rewritten “Five people died in the storm” this switches it back to active. Why? Because the action here is “to die” and the “five people” are the ones dying.

This also highlights a feature of passive voice, which is that it’s typically only formed from transitive verb forms (e.g. ones that take an object). The verb “to die” is intransitive (cannot take an object), so it can’t directly be reshaped into a passive construction—an equivalent would be something like “The storm caused five people to die.”

One last side note: writers are often told to look for and rewrite “to be” sentences when removing passive voice. This isn’t completely accurate advice. While passive constructions use “to be” as an auxiliary verb, not all “to be” sentences are passive. “To be” is also the most common copular verb, which is a verb that links parts of sentences to form equivalencies or connect a subject to its complement. Some examples of this would be:

• Jasmine is her friend.
• I am happy.
• Love is like a rock.

You could flip these sentences and maintain the same meaning without any alterations to the verb or change in voice:

• Her friend is Jasmine.
• Happy am I.
• Like a rock is love.

Some of these sound a bit awkward, like an old poem or a line of Yoda dialogue, but they are equally active in either form.

“To be” is also used as a helper verb for other constructions, like continuous and progressive tenses (I am walking, he was going, she has been helping, you will be eating, etc.). You can identify a passive construction by the type of participle that is used. Continuous constructions use “to be” plus a present participle (ending in -ing), while passive constructions use “to be” plus a past participle (usually ending in -ed or -en).

Is Passive Voice Really That Bad?

Not inherently. Passive voice is one tool in a writer’s box of tricks, and can be very useful (or even necessary) in some contexts. Using passive voice adds a sense of distance between the reader and the subject, making the action feel less immediate. When this is what you want, passive voice is the correct choice. This is one reason it’s used frequently in journalistic writing. Passive voice suggests a narrator who is an impassive observer, reporting on the results of events that have already occurred.

This isn’t the effect you want all the time in fiction. During action sequences or tense emotional moments, most writers want the reader to be immersed in what’s happening on the page, and using passive voice goes counter to this goal. Active sentences have more energy and pull a reader through the sentence because they follow the word order readers expect. The extra words and altered syntax of a passive construction slow the reader down, taking the momentum from action scenes. It can also make writing just, well, boring. There’s a lot of repetition in passive sentences, and they’re wordier, too. That gives the prose a plodding rhythm when you have multple passive sentences in a row.

All of those qualities of passive voice are why writers are broadly advised not to use it, especially in fiction—and, much of the time, that’s good advice. But this doesn’t mean you need to purge every passive sentence from your work in progress, or that an author who uses a lot of passive voice is automatically a “bad writer.” Let’s look at some of the reasons you would want to use it.

Useful Functions of Passive Voice

#1: It puts more focus on the object.

The recipient or target of the action comes first in a passive construction, and this can be used to highlight the object when it’s the key piece of information. A brief dialogue as an example:

A: Did you make this pie?

B: I made the apple pie. The cherry pie was made by Pat.

Now person B could have said “Pat made the cherry pie” (active), but using a passive construction emphasizes that they’re specifically talking about the cherry pie rather than the apple pie. This can add extra clarity when you’re discussing multiple objects. It also gives the object a bit of extra weight, centering the object over the subject as the main focus.

#2: When the agent is unknown, general, or unimportant.

Sometimes, actions don’t have a defined subject. The easiest examples of this are general statements or truths about people or the world at large:

• French is spoken in France.
• Rules were made to be broken.

While you can use general subjects (one, people, the collective “you”, etc.) when the agent is general, it’s often clearer and smoother to use the passive voice. Another common use of passive voice is when the agent of the action is unknown:

• My house was robbed.
• The artifact was crafted in the Bronze Age.

Again, you could use stand-in subjects to keep these sentences in the active voice:

• Someone robbed my house.
• An unknown artisan crafted the artifact in the Bronze Age.

Just like with general subjects, however, passive voice is often a more concise way to express the same information.

Finally, there are times when the subject is a known person, but their identity is irrelevant. This is a useful function of passive voice when describing settings and introducing character backstories. You the author may know who performed the actions, but naming them in these moments would introduce information that could confuse the reader, reveal information you’d rather keep hidden, or lead to lengthy explanations and needless worldbuilding. Examples:

• The power plant was built first and the town grew around it.
• She was wounded in the war and still limped from her old injury.

In the first sentence, it doesn’t matter who built the power plant. Including a subject would add unnecessary words and slow the reader down more than using passive voice. In the second, including a subject would distract from the main information being introduced: the character’s limp. Now, if the entire story of the injury is important, character-building backstory—and it’s an appropriate point in the story for that information to be revealed—then sure, put the sentence in active voice and give it a subject. If not, though, the passive voice keeps the blip of background info right where it belongs: in the background.

#3: To lessen responsibility or agency for an action.

Consider these two sentences:

• They made mistakes.
• Mistakes were made.

Does the second sound a bit “corporate speak”-ey? That’s because this function of passive voice is often employed in political and bureaucratic settings to downplay the agency of the subject. This function is still served even if you name the subject:

• Bill broke the lamp.
• The lamp was broken by Bill.

The passive phrasing here carries less implication that Bill was at fault—we still know he was the agent of the action, but we’re more prepared to be told it was an accident. This effect can be purposefully employed in prose to separate subjects from the action, implying that they aren’t at fault, or aren’t fully in control.

Determining When to Use Passive vs. Active Voice

There are a lot of factors in this decision—the tone and formality level of the work, the mindset and identity of the narrator and characters, what’s happening in the scene, and your personal style as a writer are all going to come into play.

On a pure sentence by sentence level, though, the best trick I’ve found is to simply write the sentence both ways and see which one fits better in context. In most cases, the shorter version will be better (and, in most cases, this will mean the active construction). That said, there are times the flow, rhythm, or voice call for a slower pace with less immediacy, and the passive construction will give you that feeling.

Are Passive and Active the Only Voice Options?

This section is mostly for grammar nerds and conlangers, so if you’re just here for advice on whether you really need to rewrite all the passive sentences in your novel, you can probably dip out now.

Now, to answer the question: in English, yes, there are only two grammatical voices. But this isn’t the case for every language. There are other relationships that subjects can have with actions, such as:

• Reflexive/pronominal voice. The agent performs the action on itself.
• Middle voice. The agent performs and is affected by the action.
• Reciprocal voice. The agent and object are performing the action on each other.
• Cooperative voice. The action is being done by a group, indicating multiple agents with shared responsibility for the action.
• Adjutative voice. The subject is not the sole or direct agent of the action, but is assisting a higher agent (who may or may not be stated).
• Causative voice. The subject performs the action on the object, similar to active voice, but because of the influence of a higher agent. A similar relationship can be expressed in English with a sentence like “Odo got Quark to give Sisko the evidence.” Quark’s still the one performing the action, but Odo is the one with agency.
• Directional Voices. The agent changes location to perform the action on the object. In the Manchu language, this is divided into two voices, one for coming towards and the other for moving away. These could roughly translate to English sentences like “He went to buy clothes” or “They came to watch a movie.”
• Antipassive Voice. This is unique to ergative languages, which make a distinction between the agent of a transitive verb (ergative case) and the subject of an intransitive verb (absolutive case). Usually, the object (also absolutive case) is emphasized in a transitive construction. The antipassive voice promotes the agent from the ergative to absolutive, making it the main focus of the sentence (and, in some cases, the object is dropped entirely). While it’s in some ways the opposite of passive voice, it serves a similar function in ergative languages in that it flips the expected construction (from emphasis on the object to emphasis on the agent, where passive shifts emphasis from the agent to the object).
• Impersonal Passive Voice. The agent is omitted, but the object remains as the grammatical object instead of becoming the subject. This is used to express general subjects, and is called the “zero person” voice in Estonian. Functionally, it serves a similar role to English sentences like “people watch lots of television” or “one wears pants in public,” where the implied subject is your average human or society as a whole.

This is surely not a complete list, but it’s a solid survey of the different ways voice is used to express, not just what is being done by whom, but the intent, cause, or location. Many of these concepts can be expressed in English (with the exception of the antipassive), but that’s done through use of adverbs, pronouns, or other additions around the verb. This is why English doesn’t consider them “voices.” By definition, a grammatical voice is a feature of the verb, and is conveyed by the use of helper verbs or alterations ot the verb itself (or both).

From a conlanger perspective, more voices can mean a more complicated grammar system, especially if you’re also using conjugation or declension systems for things like person, number, mood, and tense. The advantage is it gives more nuance to the verbs themselves, letting you express more complicated concepts with a smaller vocabulary and fewer average words per sentence.

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