The terms active and passive voice get chucked around a fair bit. But what’s actually the difference between them? And does it matter which one you’re using?

In today’s blog post we’re going to go through what we mean by the active and passive voice. We’re also going to talk about why one tends to be encouraged over the other. Finally, we’ll look at how each can be used to best effect in your writing. Lots to get through then!

What do we mean when we talk about active and passive voice?

I’m actually going to start with an example, and then explain what makes them different. One of these sentences is written in the active voice, and one in the passive voice:

• I eat the fancy crisps.
• The fancy crisps are eaten by me.

In both sentences you’ve got a subject, a verb and an object. The verb (or ‘doing word’) is the same in each case: eat/eaten. The subject in a sentence refers to the person or thing that is doing something. So, in the first sentence, I am the subject. “I eat.” In the second sentence, the fancy crisps are the object. “The fancy crisps are eaten.” The object is the person or thing being affected by the verb. In sentence one, the action of eating is being done to the crisps. In sentence two, at least as far as the structure of that sentence is concerned, I am being affected by the eating of the crisps.

So, what does this have to do with active and passive voice? The way you figure out which one you’re dealing with is by looking at the subject. Is the subject carrying out an action (making it an active subject) or is the action being done to the subject (making it a passive subject)? In our first sentence, I’m the subject, and I’m also doing the eating. That’s an example of active voice. In the second, the fancy crisps are the subject, but they are being eaten, so that’s passive voice.

For more super-fun grammar talk, check out my post on punctuating dialogue!

Why do people disapprove of passive voice?

You’ll often see advice to strip your writing of passive voice completely. That can be for a few reasons. For one thing, as you probably noticed in the examples, passive voice can be kind of clunky. Putting something in the passive voice is often longer, so switching to active can streamline your writing.

Another argument is that passive voice creates unnecessary distance between your writing and the reader. It’s not as intuitive a way of framing a sentence, so it does require a moment of your reader’s attention to decode who’s actually doing what. You’re encouraged to use the active voice, because you’re generally advised not to make extra work for your readers.

So how do you choose between the two?

Well, most of the time you are going to want to use the active voice. Mostly because it’s more straightforward. But there are reasons to use the passive voice! For example:

When you don’t know who acted, or you want to hide it.

Okay, let’s say I ate the fancy crisps, but I don’t want to take responsibility. I can use the passive voice to hide my role. “The fancy crisps were eaten.” By who? Who knows! And maybe I didn’t actually eat them, in which case I couldn’t tell you who they were eaten by. Even if I wanted to.

When you want to emphasise passivity

There are some situations in which it feels more in line with the nature of your sentence to put it in the passive voice. Take the sentence, “I was hit by a car.” You could make that active, if you wanted to. “A car hit me.” But the passive voice emphasises the fact that you were an innocent victim in the situation, and that can be useful.

To point your readers’ attention in a specific direction

The subject of the sentence feels more important than the object. That’s just how our brains work as we’re reading. If you want readers to pay more attention to the thing being acted on than the thing doing the acting, you can rearrange the sentence into the passive voice to achieve that. Look at the difference between:

• Laura was surrounded by a group of angry seagulls.

And:

• A group of angry seagulls surrounded Laura.

First is passive, second is active. Both communicate the exact same thing. Do you want your readers to be focusing more on Laura, or the group of angry seagulls? You can achieve either by your choice of active or passive voice.

What are your feelings on active and passive voice?

So that’s my summary of what these terms mean, and why people talk about them so much! Do you have a strong preference for one over the other? Let me know in the comments!