The Passive Voice is abused when the agent of the verb is not general and is indeed of consequence, but the writer wishes to obfuscate. Bureaucrats and politicians abuse the passive all the time, to hide responsibility.
Consider the following sentences:
The committee members, by a vote of 5 to 4, decided that the school nurse should immediately inform the police that Mr. Jenkins had been found smoking marijuana with several of his students.
It was decided that the authorities should be informed of an apparent misdemeanor.
The first sentence is longer. Well may it be—it is long because it delivers a great deal. It tells us quite a lot. It tells us who did the deciding, and that the decision was close. It tells us who was to do the informing. It tells us who had done what with whom. The second sentence obscures all that. Who decided? Who informed? We don’t know. We aren’t meant to know.
Or these sentences:
Several recommendations were made that were approved after discussion, after which a motion was made that further recommendations might be made in the future, contingent upon the success of the former.
We talked about hiring a janitor and a carpenter. We decided it was a good idea, and, if it worked out, we might hire an assistant for each.
No one can read more than a few sentences in the style of the first, without suffering anacephalic shock: one’s head explodes. (I made up that word.) That’s what the writer intends. The writer wants to make it as hard as possible for you, citizen, rube, peon, to understand what your betters are doing.
January 8th, 2013 | 10:52 am
I agree with the point, but the committee example is a bit weak. If you’re already discussing a committee and their actions with respect to a situation, you know it’s the committee that decided it. Giving the vote count without listing the individual votes doesn’t really make it any more accountable. Substituting “an apparent misdemeanor” for the teacher’s smoking pot with the kids is weaselly, but has nothing to do with the use of the passive.
January 8th, 2013 | 11:56 am
“Bureaucrats and politicians abuse the passive all the time, to hide responsibility.”
I don’t think bureucrats, politicians or broadcasters know the difference between the active voice and the passive voice or the use of adverbs, not to mention, split infinitives
It just sounds obfuscating to them and thus they use it.
January 8th, 2013 | 1:30 pm
Lawyers have been known to carry it to great lengths: “at least, time aforesaid a pane of glass in the window of the shop possessed by J… D… and Company Scotch Cloth Merchants in the High Street of Glasgow was wickedly and feloniously forced out and two webs of tartan and the other goods above libelled were wickedly and feloniously stolen therefrom and theftuously away taken, and said goods were immediately thereafter carried to a house in Littledowhill of Glasgow, and were then and there resetted by a person or persons knowing the same to be stolen…”
January 10th, 2013 | 5:36 pm
Not all lawyers. Newer generations (at least here in the U.S.) are rejecting that style of writing. I was taught, both in law school and in practice, to use forceful, direct language to make my argument.
One of the most annoying moments of my career was having to hand a brief over to an older partner for him to edit my writing — a partner who wrote in the old style, like the example Michael PS quotes. He replaced my writing with long, convoluted sentences dense with clauses and passive voices, and then passed it on to the partner in charge (who did not like that old style). I then had to find a polite and respectful way of explaining that I was not responsible for that version of the brief.
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