Here’s the problem with the Elements of Style: the Strunk parts are ridiculous and often wrong. The White parts (advice, basically, on how to edit) are nothing but pabulum. But ignore Strunk. There are far, far better guides that won’t have you making neurotic, grammatically senseless changes for the rest of your life. Work on understanding the way Standard English works and you’ll be golden.
I’m so tired of having the passive voice endlessly maligned. Strunk does everyone a real disservice on this front.
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
“There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
“It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
“The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)
As a sometime marker of student essays, I have a somewhat irrational hatred of the passive voice, because students pick it up in the (frequently badly written) academic texts they read and imagine that they’re supposed to write like those people do. I don’t think the passive voice is really a sin, as such, it’s just that it’s used to avoid saying “I”, or as a hedge against making a forthright statement which might be criticised as wrong, or as a hedge against making your own view clear, or as a way of sounding more “proper”, “grown-up”, “sophisticated”, &c.
eg, “It is widely considered that Marx’s theories are outdated.” Yuck. If you think Marx’s theories are outdated, more power to you, but tell me that that’s what you think, and then if there are other people who agree with you, tell me who they are and why you agree with them. Ditto for “it is believed that”, “it was found that”, “it has been shown”, &c &c.
If you’re just using the passive to put emphasis on what was done rather than who it was done by, I don’t have a problem with it. But if you’re using it to magically make agency disappear from an action so that you don’t have to think about it or take a stand on it, then you are developing bad habits of thought, not just of writing, and they will only get worse.
“Recent scholarship [either list scholars or footnote, depending on your style guide] considers Marx’s theories outdated.” <–Active Voice version
In general, passive voice isn’t a major sin, but as a sometime grader of undergraduate essays, I see a lot of students using passive voice in attempts to sound academic without understanding when passive voice is most appropriate. Active voice makes a direct connection between agent and action. Passive voice removes the agent in favor of focusing upon the action. As a result, scientific writing, especially in methodology discussions, tends to favor passive voice, since the emphasis is upon what was done, not upon who did it.
At any rate, with respect to the OP, good luck in your attempts to limit your use of passive voice. Even if you don’t eliminate passive voice, at least you’ll start to consider the different impact that comes from rewording your sentences.
I’ll make it easy for you - if you want to eliminate a lot of your passive voice, scan for conjugations of “to be.” Kill all that you find. Burn them with fire. This will be incredibly difficult for a while, and I have simply never managed to train myself to do it reflexively, but that might be why I don’t write for a living. That doesn’t fully address everything, but that method at least managed to basically get me out of both required comp classes in college (I was too stupid to actually take the A and not show up at 7:00 AM every day that summer because I am an idiot, but the offer was made, anyway). I had that hammered into me by a long parade of humorless lesbian high school English teachers, so now whenever I proof anything I cannot avoid finding and eliminating those words. Totally removing passive voice requires more work than that, but if you’re just looking for a baseline as a starting point, that might be easier than trying to figure out whether you’re focusing on the subject or the action in a sentence.
Not so much a passive/active voice thing, but one thing I’ve found that has greatly improved my writing is this: While self-editing, look at all the commas, semicolons (god forbid), parentheses, em-dashes, and colons, and try to remove them and make new sentences. If you’re any kind of prolific reader, and most writers are, you’ve likely picked up some bad unconscious habits over the years w/r/t long-ass convoluted sentences (I sure as hell did). This’ll cure that.
I certainly don’t do that for my forum posts, though, so nyaah.
The whole point was that it was so important that Strunk & White felt it really had to be repeated three times. Those repetitions were needful. YES I KNOW YOU ALL KNEW THIS ALREADY, GAH! YOU BASTARDS!
When you blather, blather purposefully.
If you must blather, then blather with a purpose.
Show your tits to a cop.
Scott bit Randy.
Scott bit Randy on the dick.
Scotty bit Randy on his dick.
You know Randy’s dick?
Scotty bit it off.
Who wants to join my gang?
This gang of yours, is it for fairies?
Tom told his mother to please not paint swastikas on everything.
The blathering was done with purpose. That purpose? To distract a policeman. The lights flashed, the sirens whooped, and Linda’s shirt hefted itself towards the heavens. The officer, temporarily dazed by the glory of her parsimmonious cleavage(Cleh-vaahge), found himself open to a most cruel bite attack(Re-vaaanche). Eluding capture, the driver and the passenger sought comrades, and they found them, in the meat packing district. Meanwhile, Tom’s mother was discharged from her duties at the Clark County Fair face painting booth.
You can write whatever you want, as long as you can look at it without thinking it’s a bunch of boring shit.
I take issue with your premise: I doubt most writers have taken writing courses past high school. I haven’t.
Word Perfect’s passive voice detection helped me recognize the passive voice patterns in my writing during high school. By using Word Perfect to tell me which of my passages seemed objectionable on the basis of passive voice, I was able to exercise most of it out of my every day writing.
That was 20 years ago. Microsoft Word probably does a better job these days.
What helped me most was diligent and ruthless editing from my peers. For example:
I thought my editor hated me the first time he put my book in the red sea. The second time, I thanked him: proofreading and editing are time consuming and only people who give a shit about you spend the time to do a proper job.
I save all my marked up text and review past edits on a regular basis. If someone took the time to show me my mistakes, I owe it to them to do all I can to avoid repeating those same mistakes.
