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Active? Passive?

January 13, 2008 in Grammar Hammer, English, Communication by Lisa

I mentioned before that I spend a lot of my time proof-reading documentation and, of course, working with professional people who want to perfect their English. Now most of the authors of said documentation (and the majority of the people I work with) have German as a native language. And as many of us already know, English and German are very different in many ways.

One very noticeable difference (and one of the tell-tale signs of a native German speaker) is the passive voice. Many German speakers seem to love the passive voice and use it with intense abandon (busily obscuring meaning and evading responsibility for actions carried out). The English language, however, loves action (think Marlboro Man) and doesn’t really lend itself to passive sentences. It is generally much more effective if used actively.

So, what’s the difference between the active and the passive voice, you might ask.

Well, verbs are either active (The president of the supervisory board approved the new hand book.) or passive (The new hand book was approved by the president of the supervisory board.).
In the active voice, the subject and verb relationship is clear and logical: the subject carries out the action.
In the passive voice, the subject of the sentence is acted upon by some other agent, or by something unnamed (The hand book was approved).

It is generally accepted that the subject should indeed carry out the action. It simply makes everything more, well, active (for lack of a better word).

Seen like this, presidents should approve hand books, but hand books should not be approved.

Having said that, and after frightening the passive voice out of all you, the passive voice is not always negative per se, and occasionally does have its purposes (albeit not as often as in German). 
It can be very useful, for example, if:
1) It is more important to draw the reader’s attention to the person or thing acted upon: The offices were broken into in the middle of the night.
2) The subject (or actor) in the situation is not important: The new risk guidelines can be found in intranet.

Here’s a post,  and here, and here, and here a bit of an explanation - all to help you get an idea of how to avoid the unnecessary use of the passive voice.

Now go out and be active!