Passive Voice Considered Harmful

Your high school English teachers probably warned you that passive voice is dangerous and forbidden. Then, when you were an adult, some guy in a leather jacket told you that passive voice is cool and should be used whenever it’s desired.

Well, the tide has turned again. If you’re a software developer, stop using the passive voice.

Wait, what’s passive voice?🔗

In English, sentences can have one of two structures: passive voice or active voice.

Active voice is when you construct a sentence as “actor → verb → object.”

Passive voice is when you construct a sentence as “object → verb → actor.”

Passive voice also allows you to construct the sentence as “object → verb” with no actor at all.

Recognizing passive voice🔗

You can recognize passive voice from two signature features:

1. A form of the verb “to be” (e.g., is, was, will be)
2. The past participle of a verb (e.g., downloaded, tested)

Here are a few examples:

What’s wrong with passive voice?🔗

If you forgot what passive voice is, you definitely forgot why you’re not supposed to use it.

You may have a hazy recollection that passive voice is grammatically incorrect (it’s not). Maybe you recall teachers telling you that passive voice is “poor style,” but that’s vague and hand-wavey.

Regardless of what you remember, there are clear, concrete reasons to avoid the passive voice.

Passive voice omits important information🔗

Passive voice’s greatest sin is that it omits critical information.

When I review design documents, I often find lines like this:

That sentence creates a lot of questions:

• Who signs the message?
• Who validates the message?
• Who performs further processing?

Here’s a rewrite of that sentence using the active voice:

“Hang on!” You might be thinking. “That wasn’t a rewrite to the active voice. That’s completely different text.”

But that’s exactly the point.

Passive voice draws the reader’s attention away from missing information, like a magician using misdirection. Converting a sentence to active voice exposes missing details.

You’ll often find that converting a sentence from passive voice to active voice reveals gaps in your thinking or designs.

Passive voice increases cognitive load for the reader🔗

Most English sentences take the form of actor → verb → object. This structure is familiar to the reader, and it allows them to parse the sentence easily.

Passive voice inverts the typical sentence structure, which adds mental burden for the reader. When they see a verb before seeing its corresponding actor, they effectively have to push it onto their memory stack and then mentally reconfigure the concept into “actor → verb → object” order.

Obviously, writing can sometimes challenge the reader and demand that they carry some cognitive load. But your reader only has finite focus. Reserve their mental energy for when you have a difficult topic to explain, not when you want to use a particular sentence structure.

When is passive voice useful?🔗

Despite all the reasons not to use passive voice, there are a few cases where it’s acceptable and, I’ll admit: helpful.

As a rule of thumb, whenever you encounter passive voice in your writing, consider a rewrite. But also consider the possibility that, in certain cases, passive voice’s benefits outweigh its costs.

Use passive voice to focus on solutions rather than assigning blame🔗

When you discuss problems with teammates, it’s important to focus on solving the problem rather than pointing fingers.

Imagine that you were performing a postmortem on a website outage, and you included this sentence:

The phrasing leads the reader to believe that Michael is the problem. If Michael hadn’t been so stupid and careless, the outage would never have happened.

Here’s a rewrite in the passive voice:

The passive voice shifts focus away from the individual and leads the reader’s attention to the systems that allowed the problem:

• Why should there be an outage if one server shuts down?
• Why is it possible to shut down a critical server by mistake?
• Why does it take three hours to get a critical server back online?

These questions are likely to yield more robust systems than simply blaming the issue on one person’s carelessness.

Use passive voice to tactfully communicate mistakes🔗

I find passive voice effective in pointing out someone’s mistake in a friendly, professional way, especially if I don’t know the person well.

For example, if a customer forgot to include their logs with a bug report, this would be a particularly hostile way of letting them know:

Instead, I would use the passive voice to avoid sounding accusatory:

Use passive voice to exclude irrelevant details🔗

Passive voice omits details, but sometimes that’s what you want. Some details are irrelevant and deserve omission.

The sentence above uses passive voice to omit details, but that’s okay.

Maybe the person who fired you was named Glen, and he was a junior HR associate. Maybe he had dreams of being a champion Scrabble player, and he his favorite color was purple.

The reader doesn’t care about Glen.

They care about why you have a pet puma, why you thought it was a good idea to bring it to work, and what happened when you did. In that case, it’s perfectly acceptable to use passive voice to edit Glen out of your story.

Practice recognizing the passive voice🔗

When I’ve campaigned to teammates about the evils of passive voice, they usually agree that passive voice creates problems, but they struggle to recognize it in their writing.

To help readers who have difficulty identifying the passive voice, I created a short exercise to test your ability to identify the passive voice:

• Exercise: Can You Spot the Passive Voice?