How much I rule; or, Active vs. Passive Voice
Contributed by David Mansfield on 17 October 2006 at 11:39A letter I received from Columbia Law School Admissions allows me to be both egotistical (Columbia sent me a letter!) and educational. Examine with me the opening paragraph:
Your name has been forwarded to us by the Candidate Referral Service of the Law School Data Assembly Service, in which you had earlier agreed to participate. On the basis of your performance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), you have been identified as a prospective law school applicant who, on that criterion, has demontrated a capability to contribute to and benefit from a legal education of the first order.
Note all the passive voice: The primary subject of the first sentence is "your name," with the verb "has been"; the second sentence features "you" and "have been." This heavily de-emphasizes the doer of the actions in favor of their object, in this case me. What would we gain or lose by rewriting the paragraph in active voice, with the actor in each sentence as the subject? Let's go one sentence at a time.
The Candidate Referral Service of the Law School Data Assembly Service, in which you had earlier agreed to participate, has forwarded your name to us.
Compared to the original wording, this is a bit clunky: the dependent clause ("in which you had earlier agreed to participate") ruins the flow of the sentence, and starting the sentence with all those capitalized words loses interest pretty quickly. Indeed, the point of the sentence gets lost, because the subject is so long; the central focus, the forwarding of a name, comes only in the last six words. That's no good; score one for the passive voice.
How about the other sentence? The central problem in rewriting this one is that, due to passive voice, I don't even know who identified me as a strong candidate; I am left to assume from campus that it is either the Candidate Referral Service or, more plausibly, Columbia itself. Making that assumption - which good writing would not force me to make - produces:
On the basis of your performance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), our office has identified you as a prospective law school applicant who, on that criterion, has demontrated a capability to contribute to and benefit from a legal education of the first order.
What does active voice do here? Not much seems to change, except emphasis. Consider: Passive voice placed the emphasis on me, and the lack of any clear performer of the identification made this even stronger. In contrast, active voice places the emphasis on Columbia's admission authority. Given that the bulk of the letter is an attempt to convince me to apply, the use of the passive voice is a strategic way of emphasizing my own role in the process and thus flattering me through cunning grammar.
This passage demonstrates how, on occasion, passive voice can serve one's purposes better than the active voice. First, it allows one to emphasize the object of an action when the object is more important.
Oftentimes, the doer of an action and the most important noun in a sentence are the same: "Thomas Edison invented the light bulb" is an example where active voice provides proper emphasis. Yet in this letter's case, "your name" is the writer's central concern, not "the Candidate Referral Service of the Law School Data Assembly Service," and so passive voice provides clearer emphasis.
Passive voice's other virtue, shown in the first sentence, is that it can prevent awkward sentences that obscure one's real point. Active voice can serve this purpose as well, but in this case passive voice was the right choice.
This by no means overrules any professorial injunctions against active or passive voice, but I mean to offer for your consideration the idea that passive voice can be used to great effect. As in that previous sentence, where using the passive voice emphasized "passive voice" - the real point of my sentence - rather than the unidentified user.
I'm going to stop now, or I'll just continue discussing the passive voice. This entry is concluded.