Evergreen Times

If you’re a writer, you may have been confronted with an instruction that you should never use passive voice. As for software like Grammarly, it goes after passive voice like a ferret after a rodent. What is passive voice? Is it wrong? Let’s take a look!

In passive voice, the subject is acted on by the verb. Let’s look at an example or two.

Passive voice: “They were destroyed.”

Active Voice: “He destroyed them.”

“Passive voice: “The screw can be found behind the machine.”

Active voice: “Find the screw at the back of the machine.”

Now, if you know anything about English, you’ll know that passive voice isn’t a grammatical error. In fact, it can be quite hard to say things without using passive voice. Here’s an example.

Passive voice: “They were killed in a car crash.”

Active voice: “A car crash killed them.”

From a purely stylistic point of view, the active voice looks weird in this example. It’s not the normal way people would choose to say that people got killed in a car crash. So let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment.

Why are We Told Not to Use Passive Voice?

The simple explanation is that passive voice sometimes (but not always) leads to “wordy” sentences. Here’s a simple example.

Passive voice: “The car is serviced by Peter every year.”

Active voice: “Peter services the car every year.”

Passive voice: “The screw can be found behind the machine.”

Active voice: “Find the screw behind the machine.”

In short sentences like these ones, the difference is slight, but in a longer one, it can be quite significant.

“To Be” or “Not to Be”

There’s an elephant to get out of the room, and that’s the belief that saying “to be” automatically places your sentence into passive voice. It doesn’t. To identify passive voice, look for the subject acting on the verb rather than a verb acting on a subject.

Clear as mud? Maybe it doesn’t even matter!

As long as your sentences are fairly short and crisp and not incorrect, there’s no reason why you should see passive voice as a problem. But what about SEO? Let’s look at that next!

Does Passive Voice Incur Search Engine Penalties?

Contrary to popular belief, experts say that passive voice doesn’t necessarily imply instant search engine penalties. However, it might affect readability scores if it makes your sentences too complicated, and readability is a ranking factor.

There’s also a better chance of you, the writer, getting tangled in your own sentences if they’re too long. So, if passive voice is making you write paragraph-long sentences, you might want to do some work towards breaking the habit. Those very long sentences, plus the possible errors you might make in them, will harm readability, and that will affect your search engine rankings.

Most people agree that active voice is more impactful, but there really are times when using passive voice is the sensible thing to do. It’s comforting to know that it isn’t the “grammatical error” or the SEO disaster that some people seem to think it is!