If the following hasn't been drilled into you by a crusading teacher or another, now is as good a time to learn about it as any...
Lights, Camera, Passiveness! No, Wait...:
Consider the following - and yes, I'm going to pick on that baby again:
Sam punched the baby in the face.
The baby was punched in the face by Sam.
Both of these sentences say exactly the same thing. The difference between them comes in their voices: the first is in active voice, while the second is in passive voice.
Two Kinds of Verbs:
Everyone still have all their "subject-verb-object" backgrounds up to snuff right now? That whole thing about how all sentences have a subject noun and a verb that modifies that noun?
Good.
That said, there are two voices of verb based on how they modify the subject: active and passive.
An active verb is one that describes the subject as "doing something". For instance, if it's an action verb, the subject is doing that action.
Tintin solves the Mystery of the Singing Sea Bass.
Sherlock Holmes injected another syringe of cocaine into his arm.
Batman will capture Two-Face next week.
In contrast, a passive verb is one that describes the subject as having something done to it. Again, if it's an action verb, someone or something else is doing it to the subject.
The Mystery of the Singing Sea Bass is solved by Tintin.
Another syringe of cocaine was injected into Sherlock Holmes' arm.
Two-Face will be captured by Batman next week.
You all with me so far? I wanna see hands if you aren't...
Why Your Teachers Hate Passive People:
Many (if not all) English teachers have an absolute hate-on for passive voice in writing. Plenty of fair reasons for it, too:
It flat-out sounds less impressive. What keeps your interest more: reading about someone that's always getting out there and doing things in the world, or reading about someone that's just kind of there while things happen to him? That's a bit of an extreme example, but that's the basic concept. active voice is called "active" for a reason. It's more assertive and as such usually has a more lasting impression than passive voice.
Passive can be less clear. Let's look back at my "Sherlock Holmes" example for a second:
Active: Sherlock Holmes injected another syringe of cocaine into his arm.
Passive: Another syringe of cocaine was injected into Sherlock Holmes' arm.
In the active example above, we understand that Sherlock Holmes the man injected drugs into his own arm. In the passive example, though, we don't know who actually performed the act of injecting the coke into his arm. I mean, if we really wanted to make it super clear we could say "Another syringe of cocaine was injected into Sherlock Holmes' arm by Sherlock Holmes", but dang... that's ugly. Even if I just chose a really bad example for that, it's really very hard to make an aesthetically nice-sounding sentence in the passive voice to explain that particular instance.
Passive voice can over complicate things needlessly. Let's look at this simple example:
Active: I bought a train ticket.
Passive: The train ticket was bought by me.
Active voice only took four words to make its point; Passive voice took six. These are really simple examples, so imagine how it might start mucking up more complex sentences. It's even more mucked up when you look at it from a linguistics point of view. In the active example, it's "nominative noun, verb, accusative case noun". In the passive example, it goes "nominative noun, verb, ablative case noun". Yeah. "Ablative". Let's not go here today. Remember the KISS rule: "Keep it simple, stupid!"
Passive voice requires "to be" verbs. "To be" verbs like "is" or "am" or "are" are not bad things, and they are important points for all languages. However, repetitive use of these verbs is boring. It is not natural to speak like this, and we as people are likely to start noticing such repetition. It is not wrong from a grammatical point of view, but it is far from exciting. That said, the very nature of the passive voice is built on verbs that go "was shot" or "is bricked". It is less pretty.
Present-tense passive voice sounds weird. "He is dazed by her stunning good looks." "We are interrupted by ninjas." "I am kissed by the princess." Seriously, who talks like that?
I think that's enough examples for why sometimes it's just best to stick to active voice in your verbs.
Not the Be-All, End-All Rule:
Obviously languages wouldn't have passive voice if they didn't have a purpose. Sometimes you just don't know who injected the world's greatest detective with his drug of choice; sometimes it's just silly to say "Grief overcomes me" rather than "I am overcome with grief".
My suggestion would be to just keep this stuff in mind and try to limit use of passive voice when you can. You don't need to stomp it out completely, but the alternative voice is just very direct, very assertive, and very no-nonsense.
It's kinda like people; aren't active types a bit more impressive than passive types?
So that's active and passive. As always, any and all questions are welcome below.
