How do I know this happened? I don’t. But it’s the best explanation I can come up with for the surprisingly widespread confusion about passives. Here’s an example typical of the stuff I see on writers’ message boards:
“How do I get this sentence out of the passive? I was walking down the street.’”
Talk to the misguided writer long enough and she’ll tell you that she believes it’s passive due to “was” or due to the “ing” at the end of “walking” or both.
She’s wrong. This sentence is not passive. Nor even is, “I had been considering thinking of wishing to go walking down the street.” Terrible? Yes. Action-packed? Hardly. But passive? No.
It’s important not to confuse action with active sentence structure.
To best understand it, start with the definition of passive sentence structure. A passive sentence is one in which the true object of an action is made into the grammatical subject of the sentence.
In “Steve wrote the letter,” the action is writing. The person doing it, Steve, is the subject of the sentence.
Now consider the same sentence slightly tweaked: “The letter was written by Steve.” Here, the main action is still writing, but the grammatical subject of the sentence is not the doer, but the do-ee — the letter.
Passive sentences are often very bad. Other times, they’re the best choice of all.
Passive structure can suck the life out of a sentence faster than you can say “bo-ring. “John hit him” has more of a pulse than “He was hit by John.” But sometimes you want to keep John out of it. And in those cases, a writer is fully justified in writing “He was hit.”
There’s no rule that says you can’t use passive structure. But to avoid falling into a common novice writing trap, you must know the difference.
