Passive Acceptance

In the "Passive Resistance" articles, we learned how to recognize some of the passive voice's many disguises and how to deal with them. While the techniques varied, the result was always an active-voice sentence that engages the reader and gets your message across.

But is active always the preferred voice? This month we're going to look at some instances in which the active voice can actually hamper your meaning. Consider, for example:

Mutant bunnies were painted on the portal to Dr. Maybe's secret lab.

Is it passive? The verb is were plus a past-tense verb, and those mutant bunnies (or paintings thereof) aren't performing any action. But they're not receiving action either. The implied action here, the painting of the mutant bunnies, occurred and completed at some time in the past. The were is roughly equivalent to had been.

How do you fix it?

You could change the subject and make the verb active ("An orange-jumpsuited maintenance guy who'd been kicked out of Juilliard had painted . . ."), but this demands that the reader picture someone who isn't present. And besides, who painted the bunnies just isn't that important.

You could keep the subject and use a different but active verb ("Mutant bunnies adorned the portal to . . ."). Sometimes this works, but in this case you might have your reader picturing three-eared bunnies mounting a wreath on Dr. Maybe's door!

So that it's clear these are not real bunnies but paintings, you might find it easiest (gasp!) to keep this one in passive voice. Just make sure your next sentence is active.

Now look at this sentence:

Fair Miss Nickeldime was pinned to the floor by the falling girder.

Passive, right? The subject (Miss Nickeldime) is receiving action (pinning). And the prepositional phrase tells us what's performing the action (a falling girder).

Seems like we've skipped back to the beginner's course, doesn't it? The correction seems blissfully obvious:

The falling girder pinned Miss Nickeldime to the floor.

Okay, that might work.

But whom does the reader care about? Miss Nickeldime or the girder? Unless the title is I, Beam, you get more emotional impact from her plight than the girder's rise and fall.

Depending on the context, you might consider leaving the sentence as is. The passive voice serves the purpose of underscoring the subject's helplessness.

Finally, let's consider:

The evil Dr. Maybe was disturbed.

Passive? Yes. Something other than Dr. Maybe is doing the disturbing.

But what?

Kind of a trick question. This passive verb (like depressed, elated, et al) describes the very nature of its subject. What can you do about it?

Now, depending on your belief system, you could say, "God disturbed the evil Dr. Maybe." But that's awkward and dodges a bigger issue.

Though grammatically a past-tense verb, disturbed functions more as an adjective. It's one of our old friends—participials!

(You don't remember participials? For shame! Go sit in the corner and proofread English 101 essays for the next two hours.)

So, what do you do with a passive-voice verb that's actually a participial?

Okay, remember a few posts back I made a distinction between passive voice and passive writing? I didn't really define the latter, putting it off until an appropriate time.

Like now.

Or rather, next post.