Damn passive voice!

[handslive]

In January, my boss passed me some other guy's partially completed document, based on a document the boss himself had done before he came here, based on some standards being set by some provincial government body somewhere (not Alberta or BC, though).  It was kind of a mess and I was supposed to "take ownership of it".  Uh, whatever that means.

I made some of the recommended revisions.  Tore out fistfuls of crap and made the document more generally applicable.  Disagreed with a bunch of stuff and banged my head against the desk more than a few times.  But I got to review it with my boss and the previous owner last week.

Seemed to get vacuous agreement about my changes.  Oh, and a strong recommendation that the document needs to be rewritten.  I suffered a psychotic split along the lines of:

What?!  But you're the two idiots who made it look this way!

and

Oh, thank god, I was hoping someone would suggest it.

At some point I'm supposed to present this document to a bunch of marketing types.  Aside from organizing the content better and adding in diagrams where they would do some actual good, I thought I'd look at improving the overall readability.  I don't usually pay any attention to the Flesch-Kincaid results that MS Word spits out.  The technical documentation I've worked on before violates most of the recommended results even when I try really hard.  Extensive use of passive voice does that.  A huge dependency on jargon does that, too.

But for this effort, it seemed worthwhile to try and write something that would be more accessible.  I'm discovering what a good idea this is.  Not only am I depending on passive voice where I don't need to, but I'm starting to question why I ever thought technical documentation should be crammed full of it in the first place.

It's hard, though.  I have bad habits.  I'm so used to this writing style that I don't even notice passive voice anymore.  I'm feeling twitchy just writing this post.  So, anyway, I'm learning a handy new habit at work.  Not one I expected to get.  And I've found a feature in Word that I like.  And it's a feature that Open Office doesn't seem to have (in version 1.1.2 anyway).  [This brings the list of features I wish I had in Open Office to a grand total of two.]  Anyone able to recommend something that way?

Comments

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I've never understood the blanket objection to passive voice. It serves a very clear purpose: that of obscuring agency. You use passive voice when you want to obscure agency for one reason or another. You don't when you don't want to do that. Saying that passive voice is just generally "bad", somehow, is sort of like saying that some other random part of the English language is just generally 'bad", like, oh, maybe future tense, or subjunctive. Very, very odd. I just don't get prescriptive grammar rules, sometimes.

-J

[handslive.livejournal.com]

Here were some things I noticed while doing these rewrites. Active sentences are shorter. Active sentences seem to have fewer prepositional phrases. In some cases, I've found I can turn a complex sentence into a simple one.

To my mind, this means that the same concepts are being explained with simpler language. Since I'm aiming for clarity here, simpler is better.

And I'm not knocking them out all together. But the number of passive sentences in the first four pages has dropped from over 30% to 4%. That's a scary statistic.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

See, I don't buy these as arguments against the passive. Of *course* they're shorter; passive constructions require an auxiliary verb and a past participle, while active constructions simply require one active verb. That's part of how the two constructions are built. Of *course* it's the same concepts being explained; the whole point behind passive is that it's all of the same concepts (or all of the same information) as an active sentence, minus the concept of agency.

If these were reasonable arguments, then there would be no need for passive, ever, and it simply wouldn't exist (since languages don't tend to retain constructions they actually don't need). The *good* argument against passive is: "there's no reason to obscure agency in this sentence." Because if there's no reason to obscure agency (which is the whole purpose of the passive), then the passive should *never* be used.

As for the prepositional phrases issue, active sentences don't actually have inherently fewer of them -- but on the other hand, if your passive sentences *do* have prepositional phrases (which is the way you show agency in a passive sentence), then it's a good clue that you don't actually need to obscure agency, and *should* rewrite it as an active.

-J

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

An example of a passive-voice headline that has a reason for obscuring agency! ;-)

-J

[handslive.livejournal.com]

-- but on the other hand, if your passive sentences *do* have prepositional phrases (which is the way you show agency in a passive sentence), then it's a good clue that you don't actually need to obscure agency, and *should* rewrite it as an active.

Ah, then I feel like I was probably on the right track. As I said, I'm not eliminating passive. Some concepts, honestly, I'm only able to state clearly using passive. But almost all of the sentences I've rewritten fall into the category you describe above. Maybe even all of them.