Autobiography of an Ex-passive Writer

By Kate Zavack

Nobody told me to be careful when I started reading Jane Austen in eighth grade, or warned me when I opened Les Misérables for the first time: nineteenth century literature is dangerous stuff for impressionable young writers. I wasn’t ready to emulate that syntactical complexity; by high school I was out of control. My sentences needed their own paragraphs, my paragraphs needed their own pages.  My clauses had clauses, and my subjects disagreed with their poor predicates.  It was a bad scene, man.

It wasn’t Jane Austen’s fault, and it wasn’t Victor Hugo’s.  They knew what they were doing.  So did George Eliot and Tolstoy and Dickens.  So where was I getting lost?  What was leading me astray? It was that sneaky trickster, passive voice.

“What’s so dangerous about passive voice?” you ask.  “Should I fear for my coherence? My sanity? My life?”

Calm down.  You can use passive voice safely.  If you construct a sentence passively because you decide it's appropriate, you’ll be okay.  The trouble with passive voice is that you can use it to avoid responsibility for your words and ideas.  You don’t have to define your terms.  You don’t have to explain causality.  When you use passive voice, you don’t have to state who did what to whom, you can get by with just the “what” and the “whom.”  Once you leave out the “who,” the “how” and the “why” are next on the chopping block.  And then you’re in a world of confusion.

Meanwhile, back in high school, I didn’t know any of that yet.  I used passive voice freely, never thinking to make sure I had a “who,” a “what,” and a “whom” clearly stated in my head, if not in my sentences.  My ideas were hazy and incomplete, and that’s I wrote such long, convoluted sentences: if you can’t articulate a point clearly and concisely in your head, you certainly can’t do it on paper.

But my life was about to change.  Tenth grade English teacher and living legend Nonia Gay Jones had a rule: her students were not allowed to write more than five percent of their sentences in passive voice.  Only five percent? That was like, impossible!

Actually, it wasn’t.  Slowly I came around and broke my habit.  My writing matured, as did my literary analysis.  I started to understand the rule, to cherish it, and to enforce it.  By my last semester of college, I was scrawling in red pen across friends’ drafts: “PASSIVE!!! UNCLEAR!!! INCLUDE ‘THE WHO’ IN YOUR SENTENCE!!!” 

All caps. Exclamation points. Red ink.  Let’s pretend I wasn’t totally annoying.