In my native language (Indonesian), the passive form is used as frequently as the active form, if not more often. So I read passive sentence in English without problem. I also see it more convenient to use the passive form when the subject in the active form is not important in the sentence, and there are lots of cases for that. Why do English speakers usually distaste passive sentence and often advise me to use more active sentences? I would love to hear some background culture influence or thinking process so I can understand it deeper. Thanks.
Learn English – Why don’t English speakers like sentence in the passive form
grammar-mythspassive-voice
Related Solutions
Word order is very important in English because it is so lightly inflected.
The core SVO sequence is usually obligatory in declarative sentences, and there are fixed transformations for negatives and interrogatives.
But your MPT pieces are 'Adjuncts' - not part of the core sequence - and may move around. Moves to the front of the sentence are common:
I bought a boat last summer. ... Last summer I bought a boat.
We take taxis a lot in New York. ... In New York we take taxis a lot.
He finished the job as quickly as he could. ... As quickly as he could, he finished the job.
And a 'light' Adjunct (one of few words) may sometimes be moved to the inside of the core sequence:
I quickly polished off the sandwiches.
Note that "✲I polished off quickly the sandwiches" is not acceptable (although as Russell Borogove points out, it's perfectly understandable). However, a light adjunct may occupy that position if the Object is markedly heavier:
We found to our dismay that he had already started working.
Such intrusions are often set off with pauses in speech, and commas in writing:
We found, to our dismay, that he had already started working.
ADDED:
As far as emphasis goes, we tend in English to rely more on vocal stress than on sentence position; position is more likely to be determined by contextual rhythm, what the previous sentence was or the previous speaker said. In both writing and we speech we also have 'information packaging' strategies that throw the focus of the sentence onto a specific piece of information: It was last summer that I bought a boat. What I bought last summer was a boat.
It's a very complicated subject about which many fat books have been written. By and large, if you keep your SVO together, your listeners will figure out what you mean pretty easily.
Mr C is right that there's no problem with the passive voice here; Ms A is right that there is a different problem with your example sentence and your 'where' should be 'when'.
That said, it's worth saying that the reason Microsoft Word always dings the passive voice is because English teachers generally ding the passive voice.
In the first five Google results for "passive voice", you've got Hamilton College's English Department sniping
The First Deadly Sin
Passive Voice...
[The] Passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject receives an action. In contrast, [the] active voice produces a sentence in which the subject performs an action. Passive voice often produces unclear, wordy sentences, whereas active voice produces generally clearer, more concise sentences. To change a sentence from passive to active voice, determine who or what performs the action, and use that person or thing as the subject of the sentence.
Also in the first five, you have Purdue University's English Department opining with bolded and underlined text
Active voice is used for most non-scientific writing. Using active voice for the majority of your sentences makes your meaning clear for readers, and keeps the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy. Even in scientific writing, too much use of passive voice can cloud the meaning of your sentences.
And it takes until you get to UNC's Writing Corner to read
1. Myth: Use of the passive voice constitutes a grammatical error.
Use of the passive voice is not a grammatical error. It’s a stylistic issue that pertains to clarity—that is, there are times when using the passive voice can prevent a reader from understanding what you mean...
4. Myth: You should never use the passive voice.
While the passive voice can weaken the clarity of your writing, there are times when the passive voice is OK and even preferable.
5. Myth: I can rely on my grammar checker to catch the passive voice.
See Myth #1. Since the passive voice isn’t a grammar error, it’s not always caught. Typically, grammar checkers catch only a fraction of passive voice usage.
Do any of these misunderstandings sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. That’s why we wrote this handout. It discusses how to recognize the passive voice, when you should avoid it, and when it’s OK.
So English teachers (a) generally learn at some point during their tertiary education that wordy Jamesian prose lost and manly terse Hemingway won and (b) quickly realize that the passive voice lets students reach their word counts much too quickly and (c) often fall back on blanket proscription instead of explaining when and how to use the passive voice for best effect.
In your [corrected] example,
Our current electric grid was conceived more than one hundred years ago when energy needs were simple.
the focus is on the grid itself, which is where it should be. Starting in on a subject
General Electric and its progeny and clones established the backbone of our current electric grid more than one hundred years ago, when energy needs were simple.
teaches us a little history but involves needless advertising and verbiage.
Old white men established our current electric grid more than one hundred years ago, when energy needs were simple.
meanwhile, has its own host of problems, if you weren't writing this for a women or cultural studies credit.
You don't have to just sit there and take misguided abuse from that paperclip, though. You can follow the instructions in this article in reverse and just tell the program to stop bothering you about the passive voice at all.
Best Answer
Here's what happened.
The Golden Age
Once upon a time, people throughout the English-speaking world used the active voice and the passive voice according to whichever seemed to suit what they were trying to say. No one attached moral opprobrium to either, the people were happy, and there was peace throughout the land.*
Some human pursuits, such as administration and science, needed to make heavy use of the passive voice, because these pursuits are largely concerned with rules and results that are independent of the person who carried them out. Any competent member of the civil service should produce the same results given the same rules as any other. "The claimant's petition for a hunting license is denied, pursuant to §12345.67(g) of the Hunting Code." The result of a scientific experiment should depend on what was done, not who did it. "0.5 gm tin was heated to 15,000,000 ºC." Mentioning the name of the lab assistant who heated it would distract from the important facts, so the passive voice is appropriate. Similarly for bank tellers, accountants, optometrists, engineers, etc.
The language used by people in these pursuits was, and still is, precise, formal, and objective—"objective" in the sense that the person who "did" the action is irrelevant. The relationship between writer and reader is impersonal. You don't negotiate with administrators or scientists, finding a compromise between your and their unique desires and situations. They merely report results. And these people get a lot of prestige and respect.
The Fall
It gradually dawned on people that if they wanted to sound formal and objective—and to get some of the respect given to professionals—they could use the passive voice even when it doesn't make sense or help communicate a thought. "It is imperative that steps are delineated for the establishing of time frames for socioeconomic priorities by responsible authorities." Similarly for highly abstract language, heavy use of the verb "to be", "big words" that derive from Latin, and other usage that's often needed legitimately in technical professions. When applied to most ordinary writing, such stylistic choices make the writing weak and unclear. "With regard to my summer vacation, the locations visited were felt to be memorable for a lifespan." I made up these last two examples as absurd parodies, but people were indeed imitating the sound of formal writing rather than using its conventions to communicate clearly.
By around 1910, many English teachers had noticed that students were resorting to pretentious, dull phrasing in their writing in an attempt to sound educated or formal. So they started advising their students to cut it out. Some produced pamphlets containing advice on how to write more clearly and forcefully. Today, the most famous of these is Strunk & White, a little handbook of advice to counter various bad stylistic choices that were common among college students in the early 20th century.
The Plot-Twist
Now here's where our story starts to turn weird. Many schoolteachers are themselves the kind of people who maintain the stability of their society by upholding strict rules. They try to measure the performance of their students fairly and in conformity with the professional standards of their time, not according to their own "subjective" judgement. This has led schoolteachers many times to reduce good advice that requires thoughtful case-by-case judgement to foolish strict rules. Strict rules, foolish or not, are much easier to teach, enforce, and measure conformity to than good judgement. Good judgement is something you gradually cultivate, and it emerges in a unique form in each individual. No standardized test can measure that.
Once it had emerged among the most respected English teachers that the passive voice was often abused, rank-and-file schoolteachers began to "teach" that the passive voice was not just easy to abuse, but wrong. It's not just unclear, it's an attempt to dodge moral responsibility! Indeed the passive has always been the voice of choice for weasels, responsibility-dodgers, and obscurantists. George W. Bush famously said "He heard a bird flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded." That's Bush's way of saying "Dick Cheney shot his friend Harry Whittington with a rifle in a hunting accident" but taking care that you don't understand it. There's no limit to the number of examples of this kind of weaselly use of the passive voice that you can find to prove that the passive is evil. Of course, you can find just as many dishonest uses of every other grammatical form, too. People use the active voice to outright lie, but only the passive voice is the target of a moral crusade.
And so, every passive construction in an essay written by a student would be marked "passive" in red ink, with points taken off. Excuse me, I mean the schoolteachers would mark every passive construction that the student wrote and take points off. Whew, I almost sank into moral depravity for a moment there. Even when passive constructions specified the agent, as in "Harry Whittington was shot by Dick Cheney", teachers would mark it in red and penalize it. Many innocent constructions that merely look similar to the passive but aren't, like "The truck is now loaded," also got marked in red and penalized. It was like the Salem witch trials of 1692, only with a lot more red ink spilled.
Upon graduating high school or college, students were trained to spot anything that looked passive-ish and excise it. Or exorcise it. When desktop computers became commonplace, even grammar-checking software joined in the anti-passive frenzy—automatically marking every passive-ish-looking verb with a red underline and telling the user to change it to active voice. Computers, of course, are the ultimate in following rules without regard to common sense.
The End (not)
And that, dear Chen Li Yong, is why some English speakers (think they) don't like the passive voice. But we're not all like that. Actually, most people don't care. Most people still choose the passive or active according to whichever seems to suit what they're trying to say, without even thinking about it. Many teachers try to cultivate good judgement in their students, and many people do their best to exercise good judgement in writing, choosing the active or passive voice not by any simple rule but according to what's relevant, what they want to emphasize, what's clear, and what sounds good. Even anti-passive activists use the passive voice all the time (without noticing). It comes up in classes and writing guides more than in real life. The only real trouble is that when many people talk about how to revise a sentence, the mythology they were taught makes it hard to converse about it intelligently.
But wait, the story's not over. Many people have noticed that all this fuss over the passive voice is absurd. A new anti-anti-passive activism is on the rise among academics. Even now, they're crafting a new mythology: about how the passive voice became anathema. They're blaming Strunk & White for making a rule against it, which Strunk & White never did. New prescriptions are justified with "science" and Google Ngrams rather than custom, precedent, taste, and reasonable opinion. Even now, new forms of faux objectivity are taking root. Instead of resorting to the passive voice, students who want to sound "objective" today report facts by explicitly stating their source even when the source is irrelevant. In another ten years, probably another substitute for choosing words thoughtfully will arise, and reasonable people will ignore that, too.
The Moral of the Story
So how does this affect you, a non-native speaker learning English?
Well, now you know that some of what you are taught about English is nonsense. Now you know that respected authorities contradict each other.
My advice is to ignore the advice to eschew the passive, and remember that the anti-passive activists are the crazy ones, not you. The passive voice is nearly always used innocently. It has many common uses, and is actually indispensible in English. Crusading against the passive voice because it can be abused makes as much sense as crusading against the present tense or the third person; those can be and are abused, too.
But you could reasonably disagree with my advice. As you gain mastery of English, you should gradually become more confident in choosing how you want to use the language. You should explore different forms of expression, read a variety of authors, see how flexible the grammar really is, and develop your own style through experience—just as every native speaker does.
*Actually, England was at war almost continuously during this time. This is a fable. Historical facts have been adjusted where necessary to support the moral. There never was a Golden Age, not even in regard to English grammar.