JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #9
July 16, 2020
A few weeks ago I wrote about Strunk and White and how their advice on the use of the passive voice is rather confused. I’d like to go into a bit more depth here. Their confusion has fed into further confusion, though it’s not clear if that book was the source of the broader confusion. You can still come across style and grammar advice for writers that insists on a blanket avoidance of what they call the "passive voice" or sometimes a bit more vaguely "passive writing," with some egregiously bad advice for rooting it out.
Passive Voice is actually a technical grammatical term that describes a sentence in which the semantic patient of the action fulfills the role of syntactic subject of the verb. In the sentence "Mistakes were made," though the verb ‘made’ acts upon ‘mistakes,’ the word ‘mistakes’ takes the subject-position in the sentence. Compare with: "Richard Nixon made mistakes." When the subject of the sentence is the semantic agent of the verb, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon,’ that is called the Active Voice. Some languages have a Middle Voice, and English used to have what is called the Passival until the 19th century, but that’s a digression from my current purpose.
Because English usually forms the passive voice with an auxiliary verb attached to the verb (mistakes were made), the advice to avoid passive writing is sometimes misunderstood as advice to avoid auxiliary verbs. You might hear someone suggest that you scour your manuscript for every occurrence of some form of ‘be’ (is, are, was, etc.) and rephrase the sentence to remove it. The intention is to rephrase "Mistakes were made" as "Richard Nixon made mistakes," but passive voice is not the only construction in English grammar that employs auxiliary verbs.
For instance, imperfective aspect is indicated by the use of auxiliary verbs: "Richard Nixon was making mistakes." Aspect is the forgotten sibling of tense among the properties of a verb, contrasting primarily between imperfective, or incomplete action, and perfective, a completed action: compare "Richard Nixon served as president" with "Richard Nixon was serving as president"--notice that the first is a completed activity, while the second feels incomplete, as if it’s about to be interrupted: "Richard Nixon was serving as president when he ordered a cover-up of the Watergate break-in."
Action in fiction is the root of plot and characterization, and action is of course expressed by the verbs in our sentences. A writer who can control grammatical aspect, the passive or active voice, and other features expressed by verbs can in turn guide the reader’s experience of the story with fine-grained detail. Bad advice about eliminating auxiliary verbs should always be ignored. I would recommend every writer dig into every bit of grammar, past and present (remember the passival?), that you can--anything and everything becomes a tool for the writer’s toolkit--and you need never make a choice in your grammar that you can’t explain why.