Passive Wording

011 min

Takeaways

• What it is: a sentence built so the thing acted on comes first and the doer may be missing
• Evidence: in one study, readers' ratings of harm and responsibility moved with passive reports
• Watch for: calling a sentence passive when its grammar is active, then rewriting the wrong thing
• Use it when: the doer is unknown, unimportant, or already the topic of the text

021 min

The problem Passive Wording creates

A sentence with no doer is complete and grammatical. A reader has nothing in it to question.

Consider an illustrative incident report written by a staff engineer: "The production database was dropped during the migration." Every word is true. The report still leaves out who ran the command, who approved it, and which step of the plan allowed it. A manager reading it cannot tell whether to change a person's access, a script, or the review process.

The writer often does not intend any of this. They know who did what, so the doer feels too obvious to write. The reader, who was not there, receives only the shorter sentence. The cost falls on the reader first, because they must ask a follow-up question or guess.

The risk is larger when the event is bad. A report on harm that leaves out the person who caused it can change how readers assign responsibility. The research section below shows measured examples of this.

This article covers the passive as a way to leave out the doer. It also covers the sentences people call passive when their grammar is active.

032 min

How Passive Wording works

Grammarians call the passive a voice. A voice is the way a sentence arranges the doer of an action and the thing the action affects. In the active sentence "Everyone in the department admires Anne's scholarship," the doer is the subject. In the passive sentence "Anne's scholarship is admired by everyone in the department," the thing admired is the subject and the doer moves into a "by" phrase.

That "by" phrase is optional. This gives two forms, and the difference between them is the whole mechanism.

Pullum calls these the long passive and the short passive. A short passive has no exact active twin. It says that some unspecified person or circumstance is responsible, but it does not say who. The reader learns that a doer exists and nothing else about them.

Passives do not always hide the doer. So the effect on meaning does not come from the passive alone. A long passive can name the doer as clearly as an active sentence does. The effect comes from deleting the "by" phrase. Writers who want to avoid the effect should look for short passives.

The passive also changes which noun comes first. A passive lets a writer keep the same topic as the subject across several sentences, even when the topic is the thing being acted on. That is a legitimate use, and the section on good uses below covers it.

Some passives use "get" instead of "be," as in "Marie got photographed by a journalist." Pullum notes that the "get" passive carries a weak tendency to suggest the person may have brought the event on themselves. A writer who picks "got" over "was" adds that suggestion without stating it.

042 min

What research found about Passive Wording and blame

Two studies tested whether reports of violence change when the doer is left in the background. Both used violence against women as their subject. Both are small, and both are described here with their limits.

Henley, Miller and Beazley (1995)

Henley, Miller and Beazley classified 1,501 verbs from news stories as active or passive. They found that passive voice appeared more often with verbs for rape and for murder than with comparison verbs. A follow-up study suggested that the negative meaning of these verbs could explain the result.

In a third study, 54 college students rated mock news reports on rape, battery, robbery and murder. The students rated victim harm and perpetrator responsibility after each report. According to the authors' summary, male readers attributed less victim harm and less perpetrator responsibility to violence against women when the report used passive voice. Both female and male readers showed more acceptance of violence against women after passive reports.

Bohner (2001)

Gerd Bohner tested the reverse direction: does the way people write reflect how they judge responsibility? Bohner showed 67 German university students a silent video of a rape and asked them to write down what they had seen. The students then rated the responsibility of the assailant and the victim.

The students used the passive more often when they described the rape itself than when they described other actions in the video. Overall, 15 percent of the constructions were passive and 85 percent were active. The passive share was about one in four for the perpetrator's actions during the rape and about one in eleven for the other actions the perpetrator took.

When the scene fit common rape myths easily, more passive use went with more rape-myth acceptance and more responsibility placed on the victim. In the same condition, more passive use went with less responsibility placed on the assailant. A rape myth is a false general belief that excuses the assailant or blames the victim.

What these studies do not show

Neither study shows that a passive sentence alone causes blame. Bohner's result is a correlation, and it held in one of his two conditions. Bohner also noted that putting the victim in the subject position can express empathy rather than blame. Henley and colleagues used college students and mock reports, not real readers of real news.

The fair reading is narrower. Writers tend to use the passive when they describe the harmful act itself, and readers' judgments of responsibility can move with that choice. The size of the effect in ordinary news is not known from these studies.

051 min

How Passive Wording affects comprehension

Responsibility is one cost. Understanding is another. Fernanda Ferreira played sentences aloud to participants and asked them to name the do-er. Ferreira found that listeners often misidentified who did what in passive sentences, especially when the sentence described an implausible event.

This means that listeners sometimes answered from what they expected to be true and not from the grammar of the sentence they heard.

The study used spoken sentences and measured accuracy on a short question. It does not show that written passives are hard in an email or a report, where the reader can re-read. It does show that the passive asks more of the reader than the active does, and that readers sometimes take a shortcut.

For a writer, the practical point is a precaution and not a tested rule. If a sentence reports an event the reader will find surprising, the passive form risks being read the expected way round. The active form removes that risk.

This is also a working-memory issue. A reader holding a short passive must keep the acted-on noun in mind and wait for a doer who may never arrive. A sentence that names the doer first removes that wait.

062 min

Sentences that are called passive but are not

A rule that says "avoid the passive" only works if writers can find the passive. Pullum collected published examples where critics, usage guides and journalists called a sentence passive when it was not.

The passive is a grammatical voice, not a tense. Pullum quotes a radio interviewer who said "Let's put it in the passive tense" and then gave the sentence "there was a ceasefire agreement." That sentence is not passive either.

Pullum lists other sentences that were criticised as passive:

"A struggle ensued" is an active sentence, not a passive one. "Five girls have died" is not a passive clause either. Neither "it is regrettable" nor "mistakes happened" is a passive.

These examples matter because they show that leaving out a doer is a wider habit than the passive. A sentence can hide who acted and still be fully active. "Bombs land" is active, and so is "an error has occurred." The effect on the reader is the same as with a short passive. The fix is the same too: ask who did it, and write that.

The reverse is true as well. Pullum points out that some passives name their doer clearly. A long passive such as "In early April, all applications will be reviewed by the committee" is a passive that names its doer fully. If a style rule flags it, the rule flags the wrong thing.

The practical lesson is to check for the missing doer, not for the grammar label. A sentence that fails the check is a problem whether or not a grammarian would call it passive.

072 min

When Passive Wording is the better choice

Strong advice against the passive ignores cases where it is the clearer sentence. There are three.

The topic is the thing acted on. Pullum quotes the opening of a Wikipedia section on a president: "President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas." With the president as the subject of the whole article, Pullum calls having his name as the subject the best stylistic option. An active version would put the unnamed or less important doer first.

The doer is unknown. "The server was breached overnight" is an honest sentence when the investigation has not finished. The active version needs a doer the writer does not have. Inventing one is worse than leaving it out, as long as the sentence does not claim more than is known.

The doer is not the point. A method section can say that samples were heated to 80 degrees. The reader wants the procedure, and the person at the bench is not information. This is the use that cooperative-principle would support: a writer should give as much information as is needed and no more. Naming the doer in every sentence would add words the reader does not need.

A long passive can also fix an awkward order. Pullum describes a rule that the "by" phrase should carry information at least as new as the subject. A sentence that follows it reads naturally: "Have you heard the news about YouTube? It was bought by Google." The reversed question and answer would sound wrong.

The test for each of the three is the same. Ask whether a reader who needs to act on the sentence would have to ask who. If so, name the doer. If not, the passive is fine.

082 min

How to check and rewrite Passive Wording

A rewrite takes four steps.

1. 1

   Find the sentences with no doer.

   Look for a form of "be" or "get" followed by a past participle, such as "was approved" or "got delayed." Also look for sentences where "happened," "occurred" or "took place" stands in for a doer.

2. 2

   Ask who did it.

   If you know, write the name or the role. If you do not know, say so in the sentence.

3. 3

   Decide whether the reader needs the doer.

   An incident report, a decision record and an apology do. A procedure description often does not.

4. 4

   Keep the passive where the topic is the thing acted on,

   and name the doer in a "by" phrase when both matter.

Here is an illustrative before and after from a PM's weekly status email.

The after version uses two roles and one first-person admission. The change is structural. The doer moved into the subject position, and the writer accepted ownership of their own step.

A sentence to use in a review meeting: "I see the decision, but who made it? Please add the name or the team."

The check works in the other direction too. When reading someone else's report, a short passive in a bad-news sentence is a prompt to ask, not proof that the writer is hiding anything.

092 min

When rewriting Passive Wording goes wrong

Rewriting to remove every passive creates its own failures.

Naming a person where a system caused the problem. "A junior engineer deleted the table" is active and may be unfair if the process let any engineer delete it. In a review of an incident, the passive "the table was deleted" can be the honest first sentence, followed by a sentence about the process. Naming the doer is for accuracy, not for blame.

Rewriting sentences that were never passive. Pullum shows that "Responsible for management of three direct reports" is not passive. The resume site Pullum quotes says "Managed three direct reports" is better because it is shorter and more direct. That may be true, but the reason is length. Pullum notes that not one of the four examples the site cites as passive is a passive.

Making the sentence wrong. Replacing a short passive with an active sentence requires a real doer. If a writer guesses, the reader gets a false statement. "Someone changed the setting" is an active sentence that claims more than "the setting was changed."

Treating the passive as proof of evasion. The studies above found associations in how people write and read, not a rule about intent. A passive in a report is a reason to ask a question. It is not a reason to assume bad faith. The reverse is true too. An active sentence can still hide who is responsible, as the examples of "mistakes happened" and "bombs land" show.

The tell that a rewrite has gone too far is that the new sentence names a doer the writer cannot support, or that it adds words and no information.

101 min

Passive Wording vs. nearby concepts

Active Voice. Active voice is the grammatical form in which the subject performs the verb. Passive wording is about what the passive form does to meaning, mainly through the missing doer. The two share grammar and differ in question. Active voice asks how to write a sentence. Passive wording asks what a reader loses or infers when the sentence has no doer.

Framing effect. The framing effect is the finding that the same facts, described differently, lead people to different choices. A short passive is one way to change the description. The research above is close to a framing result, but it measured judgments of harm and responsibility, not choices between options.

Plain-language advice. Style guides often say "use active voice" as a single rule. Passive wording separates the two jobs inside that rule: keep the doer visible, and avoid weak constructions. The first job is about information. The second is about style, and Pullum argues that the usual charges against the passive are baseless.

Responsibility and attribution. When readers assign blame, they are making an attribution about cause. The concept of attribution error covers the habit of crediting a person's character for what a situation caused. The studies cited above did not test this link.

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