“Avoid passive voice” is some of the most repeated writing advice in existence, and also some of the most frequently misunderstood — because most writers who’ve heard the rule can’t reliably identify passive voice when they see it, let alone judge when it’s actually the better choice.
What Passive Voice Actually Is
Passive voice happens when the subject of a sentence receives the action rather than performing it. The grammatical structure is a form of to be plus a past participle:
- Active: “The editor cut the chapter.”
- Passive: “The chapter was cut by the editor.”
- Passive (agent omitted): “The chapter was cut.”
Note the key giveaway: passive voice can drop the by whom entirely, and often does. That’s part of what makes it both useful and dangerous — it lets a writer avoid naming who’s responsible for an action.
The Common Misdiagnosis
A huge number of writers — and even some editors — flag any sentence with a “was” or “were” as passive, when past tense alone isn’t the issue.
- Not passive, just past tense: “She was tired.” (No action being received; this is simply a state of being.)
- Passive: “She was told to leave.” (Someone did the telling; she received the action.)
The test: ask whether the subject is doing something or having something done to it. “She was tired” — nothing is being done to her. “She was told” — the telling was done to her by someone unnamed. Only the second is passive voice.
Why Active Voice Is Usually Stronger
Active voice tends to be more direct, more economical, and clearer about agency:
- Passive: “Mistakes were made.”
- Active: “I made mistakes.”
The passive version is famous precisely because it’s evasive — it describes an action with no actor, which is often exactly why writers reach for it instinctively, consciously or not. In fiction and most nonfiction, readers connect more with sentences that show someone doing something rather than something happening to someone unnamed.
Active voice also tends to run shorter, which compounds across a full manuscript into meaningfully tighter, faster prose.
When Passive Voice Is Actually the Right Choice
The rule against passive voice is a strong default, not an absolute law, and there are real cases where passive voice serves the sentence better:
When the actor is unknown or irrelevant. “The building was constructed in 1920” is better than inventing an unnecessary actor just to satisfy the active-voice rule. Nobody needs “Workers constructed the building in 1920” if the workers aren’t otherwise relevant to the passage.
When you want to emphasize the recipient of the action over the actor. “The manuscript was rejected fourteen times before it was accepted” keeps the manuscript as the throughline of the sentence, which may be exactly the emphasis a passage needs, especially if the surrounding paragraph is tracking the manuscript’s fate rather than the agents doing the rejecting.
When concealment or ambiguity of the actor is the point, dramatically. In fiction, a passive construction can create deliberate unease: “The door had been left open” raises the question of who left it open, which may be precisely the tension a scene wants, more than “Someone had left the door open” would.
In certain formal or scientific writing conventions, where the convention itself favors passive constructions to keep focus on the process or findings rather than the researcher: “The samples were tested under controlled conditions.” Even here, most contemporary style guides now lean toward active voice where it doesn’t sacrifice clarity, but the convention hasn’t disappeared entirely.
The Practical Self-Edit
Rather than banning passive voice outright, the more useful practice during revision is to flag every passive construction and ask, deliberately: is this passive because it’s the right choice for this sentence, or because it’s the version that came out first? Most first-draft passive constructions fall into the second category — they’re just what the brain produced under first-draft speed — and converting them to active voice tightens the prose with very little cost. The remainder, the deliberate ones, are worth keeping exactly as they are.
