Which is a good reason to use the passive voice in writing?

Answer 1

In the active voice the object receives the action of the verb. In passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb, and the agent or doer of the action may be omitted, as in the following examples:

Active: The English defeated the French (French, as object, receives the action).

Passive: The French were defeated. (French, now as subject, receives the action, no agent).

Active: The hunters killed the quarry. (quarry as object, with agent).

Passive: The quarry was killed. (quarry as subject, no agent).

Active: Jane repaired the car (car as object, with agent).

Passive: The car was repaired by Jane (car as subject, with agent).

Passive: The car was repaired (car as subject, no agent).

Answer 2

eg. the boxer was saved by the bell

Passive tense allows us to put someone or something that is not the actor first in a sentence - in the position of subject.

The cat was chased. (by the dog) - passive

The dog chased the cat - active.

To form a passive sentence:

be +past particle. eg is used/was eaten / is being asked

The road is being built this year.

We use the passive tense without the actor if the actor is not important or not known.

The Mona Lisa was painted in the 16th century.

Help! The post office has been robbed!

The passive also allows us to leave the actor until the end of the sentence, if the actor is important.

The painting is very valuable, it was painted by Van Gogh.

The passive is often used when writing about a process eg.

The tea leaves are picked. Then they are washed, sorted and dried. The dried tea is then packed.

Answer 3

Passive tense allows us to put someone or something that is not the actor first in a sentence - in the position of subject.

The cat was chased. (by the dog) - passive

The dog chased the cat - active.

We use the passive tense without the actor if the actor is not important or not known.

The Mona Lisa was painted in the 16th century.

Help! The post office has been robbed!

The passive allows us to leave the actor until the end of the sentence, if the actor is important.

The painting is very valuable, it was painted by Van Gogh.

To form a passive sentence:

be +past particle. eg is used/was eaten / is being asked

The road is being built this year.

Answer 4

One of the uses is to avoid saying who or what was responsible. It's used by politicans when they say: "the economy has been ruined" when they could have said "we have ruined the economy". But they don't wan't to say that so the passive is a good cop-out.

Answer 5

1. When the actor is not known. It can be a stylistic flaw to use "somebody": Somebody shot the president! vs The president was shot. The first focuses far too much of the reader's attention on wondering who "somebody" is.

From Steven Gould's essay "The Bell Curve":

Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended - that is, either supported or denied - by such a restricted approach.

Or this one:

Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be given tasks of value, and self--esteem could be found for people on all steps of the IQ hierarchy...

Who will give out these tasks, and who will find this self-esteem?

2. When the actor is unimportant and the result is what counts. In this sentence from Gould's essay:

Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be explained to lay readers...

we begin with an active clause and then go to a passive one in which it is the topic, referring back to the immediately preceding clause, and there is no actor (who can explain it? Mathematicians? Gould himself? Does it matter?).

Another example I heard one morning on NPR:

Interviewer: Thailand has been suffering through a complicated situation. If he can sort it out in two weeks, won't that be a good thing?

Analyst: I doubt it can be sorted out that quickly.

The analyst didn't want to discuss whether the general could or could not sort the situation out; her doubts aren't about him but rather about the situation in general.

3. When the relative value of actor and patient are greatly different: A bus ran over Bob vs Bob was run over by a bus. Or Eddie's recurrent question in "To Have and Have Not": "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" How different that would be in active voice: "Did a dead bee ever bite you?" From Gould's essay:

if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers

Should this read

if only numbers did not frighten them

? Would that be any kind of improvement?

4. When the patient is part of the Topic, not the Comment (this is Information Structure - basically, Topic is old, given, known information - what we're talking about - and Comment is new information - what I have to say about it). The Old information comes first and the New comes last. Within longer structures such as paragraphs or essays, this sort of structuring makes following the discourse much easier. The passive sentences I quoted from Gould's essay were mainly of that sort:

The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph with an axis for each test.

This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner today.

And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that bias doesn't exist, which is the only issue analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve.

Note in each of these sentence the presence of a demonstrative pronoun (these tests, this theory, this crucial question), which indicates that the subject of this sentence was introduced in the preceding one. Classic Information Structure: Comment becoming Topic.

There are other times the passive is good - to preserve mystery or ambiguity or to set up a joke.

Answer 6

• you don't know (or don't wish to reveal) the identity of the subject;
• you want to emphasize the receiver of an action;
• the performer of the action is not important.