active voice

Who are they and why are they avoiding passive voice?

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A cafe on the ground floor of our office building has a screen which cycles through photos and short videos, weather forecasts, book, tv, movie and podcast reviews, and, relevantly, trivia questions. Yesterday, one of these was “When [or maybe What year] did they open the London Underground?”. My guess (1861) was reassuringly close to the actual answer (1863). (I have browsed through Wikipedia’s articles on various rail networks, but have never memorised relevant dates.) But I couldn’t help thinking about why they chose to ask the question like that. 

There’s nothing wrong with the question as it is; active voice is the default within the English verb system. But it throws too much emphasis onto they, when we either don’t know or don’t care who they were. Who opened the London Underground? Some representatives of royalty, government, commerce and industry, probably. Passive voice is useful in situations like this. 

You may have noticed that I wrote “But I couldn’t help thinking about why they chose to ask the question like that”. Same question: who are they? We don’t know individually, but we know there was a person (they!) or people who chose to ask the question like that. Besides, that clause doesn’t have a direct object to become the subject of the passive voice alternative. Compare “They chose that question to demonstrate active voice” > “That question was chosen to demonstrate passive voice” or “Why did they chose that question to demonstrate active voice?” > “Why was that question chosen to demonstrate passive voice?”. 

Further thoughts about passive voice

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Many explanations of active and passive voice state that in active voice, the subject does the action, and in passive, it receives it. This explanation is inadequate, because there are many transitive verbs (that is, verbs requiring a direct object) in which there is no action, or if there is, the receiver of the action is not the direct object. There are several groups of these.

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Passively accepting grammar check suggestions

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I don’t use the grammar check on Pages for Mac at home, but I do on Word for Windows and Mac at two workplaces. Even if I ignore it nine times out of ten, it saves my backside the tenth time, with all the copying/cutting, pasting, adding and deleting of text I do. A few weeks ago it flagged three instances of passive voice. It correctly identified passive voice, but its suggestions for change were wrong. (It actually flagged more than that. I took photos of three then gave up.)

Firstly, there is nothing inherently wrong with passive voice such that it needs to be flagged every time, in the same way as, say, subject-verb number disagreement, which is always wrong. Even the most anti-passive style advisers, such as Strunkandwhite and George Orwell, use passive voice  perfectly when appropriate. Secondly, if you’re going to suggest changing it, then make absolutely sure that your suggestion is right.

But that is not easy for a computer to do, as these three (slightly adapted) examples show. 

1) Protection is provided by defining a safety area, whose shape and dimensions must be specified according to a risk assessment.

Suggestion: Defining a safety area, whose shape, provides protection [plain wrong]

2) Alerts and reports are provided by [this software] displaying information in an intuitive and easy-to-read format.

Suggestion: [This software] displaying information in an intuitive and easy-to-read format provides alerts and reports [mostly wrong]

3) Areas of the multi-purpose centre have already been made available for use by community groups offering support and services to [this organisation’s] customers.

Suggestion: Community groups offering support and services to [this organisation’s] customers have already made areas of the multi-purpose centre available for use [possibly right, but not]

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