Passive Voice Is Not Always Wrong
I was sitting in a windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that was technically “correct” but felt like reading a dry legal deposition. The author had been told by every writing workshop in existence that passive voice was a cardinal sin, so they had scrubbed it so thoroughly that the prose had lost its pulse entirely. Most people think they understand how passive voice actually works, but they usually fall into one of two camps: the terrified amateur who deletes every instance of “was” like it’s a typo, or the academic who uses it to hide behind a curtain of unearned authority.
I’m not here to give you a grammar lecture or a list of rules that will make your prose sound like a robotic instruction manual. Instead, I’m going to show you how to use it as a precision tool to control pacing, emphasis, and even the way you manage a reader’s attention. We are going to talk about the difference between a stylistic choice and a lazy sentence, and I’ll tell you exactly when it’s worth your time to fix it and when you should just keep moving.
Identifying the Agent in a Sentence Before You Lose the Reader
To fix the problem, you have to stop looking at the verb and start looking for the person actually doing the heavy lifting. In any sentence, there is a grammatical subject and object playing a game of tug-of-war. In an active sentence, the subject is the hero; they perform the action. In the passive, the subject is just a bystander, sitting there while something happens to them. Identifying the agent in a sentence is the quickest way to see if you’ve accidentally turned your protagonist into a piece of furniture.
If you find yourself writing “the decision was made” or “the report was filed,” you’ve lost the agent in the fog. You aren’t just being formal; you’re obscuring accountability. When I’m reviewing a manuscript, I look for these moments because they kill the momentum. Clarity is expensive, and you pay for it in reader fatigue every time you hide the actor. If you want to master sentence structure and clarity, you have to force the actor back into the spotlight. Stop letting things “be done” and start telling us who is actually doing them.
Grammatical Subject and Object Where Your Clarity Goes to Die
The problem with most writing advice is that it treats the grammatical subject and object like abstract concepts from a dusty textbook rather than the structural bones of a sentence. In a healthy, active sentence, the subject is the engine; it performs the action, moves the plot, and keeps the reader engaged. But when you slip into the passive, you’re essentially decoupling the engine from the wheels. You take the person or thing doing the work—the agent—and demote them to a prepositional phrase at the end of the sentence, or worse, delete them entirely.
This is where your sentence structure and clarity begin to erode. When the subject is no longer the actor, the reader has to perform a subconscious mental calculation to figure out who is actually responsible for what. It’s a micro-tax on their attention. If I’m editing a manuscript and I see a paragraph where the objects are constantly being acted upon by invisible forces, I don’t just see a stylistic choice; I see a writer who is making their reader do the heavy lifting for free. You aren’t just losing momentum; you’re losing authority.
Five Ways to Stop Hiding Behind Your Verbs
- Look for the “by zombies” test. If you can add the words “by zombies” to the end of your sentence and it still makes grammatical sense, you’ve slipped into the passive voice. “The manuscript was edited by zombies” works; “The manuscript was edited” is a stylistic void where your agency used to live.
- Stop using the passive voice to dodge accountability in non-fiction. If a mistake was made, don’t write “errors were discovered”; write “I found errors.” The former sounds like a corporate press release designed to avoid blame, and readers can smell that kind of deflection a mile away.
- Use the passive voice only when the recipient is the star of the show. If you’re writing a crime novel and the body is the focus, “The victim was found in the library” is fine. But if you’re writing a memoir about your own life, “The coffee was spilled” is just a lazy way of avoiding the fact that you were clumsy.
- Watch out for “to be” verbs acting as crutches. Words like is, was, were, and been are the scaffolding of the passive voice. If you find yourself leaning on them too heavily, you aren’t building a sentence; you’re just propping up a pile of nouns.
- Remember that clarity is a currency. Every time you use a passive construction, you are asking the reader to spend extra cognitive energy to figure out who is actually doing the work. In a competitive market, don’t make your readers work for free; give them direct, active sentences that get straight to the point.
The Bottom Line on Passive Voice
Stop using the passive voice to dodge responsibility; if your protagonist isn’t the one making the choice, the reader will feel the momentum stall, and a stalled narrative is a dead manuscript.
If you can’t identify the “agent” performing the action, your sentence isn’t just passive—it’s broken, and no amount of lyrical prose will save a paragraph that lacks a clear driver.
Treat clarity as a professional courtesy; every time you force a reader to mentally reconfigure a sentence to figure out who did what, you are asking them to work for free, and they will eventually stop reading.
The Hidden Cost of the Unseen Actor
Passive voice isn’t just a grammatical choice; it’s a way of laundering responsibility. When you write ‘the mistake was made’ instead of ‘I made a mistake,’ you aren’t just being formal—you’re asking your reader to do the unpaid labor of hunting down the person actually responsible, and quite frankly, they haven’t signed up for that kind of overtime.
Cressida Farrow-Bassey
The Bottom Line on Voice
At the end of the day, mastering the passive voice isn’t about memorizing a textbook definition of the “agent” or obsessing over whether a noun is a subject or an object. It is about accountability in your prose. If you spend your entire manuscript hiding behind “it was decided” or “mistakes were made,” you aren’t just being grammatically vague; you are actively eroding the trust between you and your reader. You are making them work harder to figure out who is actually driving the narrative, and in a competitive market, readers don’t have the patience to do your heavy lifting for free.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not telling you to go on a scorched-earth campaign to delete every single passive construction you find. Sometimes, the person being acted upon is the only thing that matters, and forcing an agent into the sentence can feel clunky and unnatural. Use it when it serves the rhythm or the focus, but never use it as a crutch to avoid making a choice. Write with intention, own your sentences, and remember that clarity is the most valuable currency you have. If you can make a reader feel the impact of a sentence without them having to pause and decode it, you’ve already done more than half the aspiring writers in the slush pile.
