Somebody sometime was told by someone that the use of the passive voice is incorrect. Since that time, writing teachers have taken pen to paper to mark out, to rid the English language of one of its most poetic grammatical constructions: the passive voice.
I’m always surprised by how many writers and teachers of writing vehemently believe that the passive voice is wrong, in the same way that, say, subject-verb agreement errors are wrong.
If you’ve never considered this before, consider it now: style books are political. Moreover, they are personal and biased, based on the writer’s own predilections for language.
If I ruled the universe, students would not use style books to learn to write. They may read them in order to obtain an appreciation, however, of the opinions of other writers. To read about writing is a beautiful thing. What students would use to learn how to write would be great writing. (They would read Tristam Shandy.) Reading great writing is what teaches great writing.
And great writing is full of the passive voice; it breaks all the rules prescribed by handbooks on style.
Sure, but would you agree that passive voice is less effective in some genres of writing than in others? For example, in reports, proposals, and persuasive essays passive voice tends to obscures agency so that an action will be performed but who will be performing it is subordinated.
One of the groundbreaking proposals about Chomskyan transformational syntax was the view that the two sentences (I love the passive voice vs. The passive voice is loved by me) are 'undelyingly' the same no matter which voice it is, since both of them are semantically identical (i.e. they are true in the same world situations). So in that sense, passive voice is not 'wrong'. It just underwent an extra 'transformation' process.
Of course, this is not to deny all the interesting stylistic effects of using active or passive voice that Mikhail is pointing out. The matter does seem to be genre-dependent. Another delicate thing to teach the students!
Jenny’s post raises another issue that is often overlooked in efforts to teach writing–that there are many ways to say the same thing correctly. Yukiko points out that regardless of voice, the two statements are semantically identical, but they certainly have different impacts. When do students learn style? When I work with students on thesis statements, for example, I often push students to rephrase the same sentence, showing them that all the versions the class comes up with are correct, but that some will work better than others in a given essay. If students are taught that the passive voice is wrong, rather than a stylistic choice, they don’t learn how to make use of the nuanced differences between passive and active voice, and miss an opportunity to develop their writing styles.
As another commenter mentioned, the key aspect of this discussion as it relates to working with students is to present students with an awareness that employing the passive should be a choice that they make. For a long time, I can recall teachers of mine (even into college) circling my sentences and including a hasty scribble beside it: PASSIVE VOICE. It took a one-on-one course in a language not my own (Spanish) before I truly understood what the passive voice DOES. Jody's point is a good one: it's a stylistic choice that needs to be highlighted and probed more deeply than just a scribble. Mastering these stylistic choices are important in all the types of writing mentioned above, and especially for students moving on to graduate education, or students interested in submitting to publications, be they peer-reviewed, or not…