Passive Voice Hate is a Meme

[Saddamanon No.21878734]

so let this be gotten straight by me: EVERYBODY was wrong before “le passive bad” meme started to be promoted by writers in the 20th century? Why was passive even invented? Why was it made part of language if it’s completely bad? Why would there *never be* instances where it’s better for it to be used by you?

[Saddamanon No.21878739]

>>21878734
example:
>”the passive voice isn’t overused” is a better sentence than “people don’t overuse the passive voice”, because it keeps the subject consistent with prior sentences instead of arbitrarily changing the focus cuz of writing advice autism

[Anonymous No.21878745]

>>21878734
>Why was passive even invented?
are you retarded

[Anonymous No.21878750]

>>21878739
>one might say otherwise, but people dont overuse passive voice
>despite claims to the contrary, passive voice isnt overused

[Anonymous No.21878762]

>>21878734
didn't know you were a crossposter.
Also thanks for making me realize what passive voice is.

[Anonymous No.21878770]

>>21878734
You risk transforming language into an ergative one, if you abuse passive voice too much.
Then you'd have to invent the Dative case anew to mark the subject. And the anti-passive voice construction shall emerge.

[Anonymous No.21878779]

>>21878770

[Anonymous No.21878782]

The passive voice isn't inherently bad but as a stylistic choice, many dislike it as the use of passive voice is typical of very formal English (IE formal letters, reports, proposals), and bad authors tend to rely on it as a stylistic crutch to make their text sound more authoritative or profound. Typically it's something you teach students to write at a lower level, so they can alternate between active and passive voices; beat it out of them at a more advanced level when they write entire texts only in the passive voice, and then make them relearn how to use it in appropriate contexts.

[Saddamanon No.21879778]

>>21878762
>Also thanks for making me realize what passive voice is.
kek

[Anonymous No.21879955]

>passive voice bad
>adverbs bad
>long sentences bad
>only correct way of writing is to ape stephen king
why is every "writing advice" like that

[Saddamanon No.21880007]

>>21879955
kek

[Anonymous No.21880113]

>>21879955
Because its how to appeal to the most readers to make the most money

Do you want an actual write up explaining this?

[Anonymous No.21880145]

>>21878770
I don't play that game.

[Anonymous No.21880206]

>>21880113
I should elaborate. I'm actually in a mood to do an effort post rant explaining the shit show that is the publishing industry in this regard.

However, I would also like to use such an oppurtunity to ask for algorithm boosting. I've got a webnovel on RR that could use some engagement. I'd also bring up twitter but anons are allergic to the bird app.

[Anonymous No.21880253]

>>21880206
Do you think it’s best to use passive and active voices alternatively? What do you think leads to the best writing irrespective of what publishers think? Feel free to effortpost.

[Anonymous No.21880397]

>>21880253
Yes you must alternate. That is what's done by great writers. Otherwise you'd sound stale. And sounding stale is not what would be desired by you.

[Anonymous No.21880431]

>>21878734
People who don’t know much about writing latch onto little pointless things to make themselves believe they have a grasp of writing style. Unnecessary hatred of passive voice and gerunditives; reluctance to end sentences with prepositions; a misunderstanding of why the pluperfect form is sometimes used versus the perfect. These are all things that exist in writing for a reason, so aimlessly throwing them out is questionable. I do understand some of it though from a stylistic perspective. For instance, the infinitive form just sounds stronger and more straightforward than a gerund equivalent. Also hard stylistic rules and pedantry may help younger people or ESLs who don’t yet grasp all the finer points of writing.

[Anonymous No.21880449]

>>21880253
When to use passive voice and active voice is too complex to be answered with something like "alternate them".

First, let me lead by saying writing advice is a bigger market than writing is. There are almost no ways left to make a living as an author and those that remain don't appeal to anons on /lit/. I'll come back and explain this point some more, but what's important is that how-to-write books and youtubers are appealling to fucking retards who can't string a scene together. The amount of poeple out there who think that writing is something anyone can do is staggering. Then they get slapped by reality and convince themselves that they can use money to buy their way to skill.

Fact of the matter is the only thing that will make you a better writer is reading, writing, and critical analysis. It's fucking hard to write well. It is far far easier to put on a low cut top that exposes your tits, fill your basic bitch tutorial with quirky snark, and then shill your failure of a book like it's actually good because what that book is actually doing is selling your craft content that was regurgitated from a thousand other hacks doing the same shit.

This is why nobody understands "don't use passive voice" and "show don't tell"


To attempt to answer your question, the difference between passive and active voice determines when you use one or the other, namely it's the pacing. Passive voice is slower than active voice. In a properly constructed story, you will often want to slow down and other times you want to be a whirlwind of action.

Going back to the wine drinking cat mom that forms the core demographic of how-to-write books, their biggest issue is either that they're too brain dead to envision a scene with humans acting in it, thus they can't communicate it to the reader, or its because their story doesn't fucking go anywhere. it's a 200k boat anchor dressed up like a passionate romance when its actually a screed about hating her boss that snubbed her ten years ago. When the average manuscript is dog shit, it does genuinely help the novel if you give a hard rule that you must ALWAYS be in active voice because then the writer just might shut the fuck up about stupid shit and get on with the plot.

Maintaining anticipation in the reader is the most important thing a story can do, which is an effort post all on its own. The short version is that you have to make the reader care about the characters for some reason, and then have them moving towards a future action with indeterminate outcomes. Failure to do this is the #1 reason for shit writing. it is the most important thing for a new writer to fix. I strongly believe in categories of fiction elements and you should not even bother caring about the later categories before you fix the foundations. Making the reader care is more important than the elegance of the prose.

1/?

be right back, getting liquor

[Anonymous No.21880494]

>>21880449
That said, prose quality is often the quickest way to judge when you should not be using passive voice. As the earlier anon mentioned about the dictive case being absent from english, a lot of sentences just don't make any sense in one tense or the other

>Washington was marching north. (Active)
>North was marched by Washington. (Passive)

That second sentence is nonsense.

>His coat was blue. (Passive)
>His blue coat kept him warm. (Active)

You might think I cheated here by expanding the idea in the second sentence, but that's actually the point I want to highlight. You should basically NEVER include a statement of fact when the idea can be combined into another sentence.

Now, methods of rhetoric can be used to control where an idea falls within an paragraph.

Don't be some style rebel who disregards the formatting of the words on the page. Line breaks, indents, page breaks, chapters and scene breaks are all useful tools for the writer to package ideas together and create pauses in the reader's mind. You know those shit ass PEMDAS meme questions that go viral on Boomerbook? 2+2*2÷2 = ?? People argue about that because it isn't clear. There would be no argument whatsoever about 2+(2*2)/2 = ??. When you omit formatting, you are the former rather than the latter.

>John returned home late, his eyes bloodshot and his breath liquored. He turned down the photoframe of him and his wife. Then he whistled for his dog. there was no scampering of claws across the hardwood. When he stepped into the living room, glass crunched beneath his boot. Across from him, the window curtain billowed. Slowly, he reached behind his back and drew his 9mm before flipping the light switch. In the middle of the room was the corpse of his John Wick's dog.

That last sentence (say what you will about the rest of the paragraph) is passive. I could have written "John Wicks dog lay dead in the middle of the room", if I were listening to tutorial grifters but by putting the critical information at the end of the paragraph I am signfifying it as more important.

Corollary, I technically could have said "John Wicks dog laid dead." but that omits the critical detail of physical position. It requires the reader to fill in the gap on where the dog is in the scene, how John is seeing the dog. Maintaining the dream illusion of the book's reality is how you tap into the reader's subconscious levels of experience. It's how you get them to gasp, to tremble with rage and cry with anguish. If the reader ever has to pause, either becuase there's an error, or because something necessary was omitted, or becuase they don't know what a word means, you are forcing them to use their higher brain functions and shutting off that empathic experience. This is also why I don't think people should start with the Greeks, nor the canon. Comprehension has to be effortless and people start like children.

2/?

[Anonymous No.21880498]

>>21880494
>of his John
Apologies for the typo. That should obviously be a mistake and not held against the point.

[Anonymous No.21880547]

>>21880494
I want to remind you at this point that most people who say they are a writer are enamored with the idea of being a creative. They want the social status. Grill them on the last time they wrote and they'll crack. They'll squirm and complain that they're busy, they have families and jobs and they get tired, as if that isn't true of every fucking successful author, and every unsuccessful too for that matter. Fuck you boomer. I write 2000 words a day and ahve a full time job. It doesn't take all day to write just like it isn't a big commitment to go to the gym, you're just a lazy fat fuck who's never going to make it.

Most of these people are working off the memories they have from years and years ago of the enthrallment they had with one book or another. Harry Potter is a prime example. They don't even read regularly and then they're surprised when they can't write. Fucking hell that's like trying to learn an instrument without ever hearing someone else play music. WTF.

These are the kinds of people who have to edit in layers. They need guidelines on how to write because they can't remember what characters are in a scene. They can't remember what different characters want at the same time. To imagine a land lady might not give a shit who killed her tenent, that she just wants the apartment cleared out so she can rent it to someone else, is too fucking hard for these cat ladies when their head is already filled with the raw unbridled genius of their detective noticing that the strangulation bruises perfectly match the seam pattern of Bugatti leather gloves from the spring collection.

Ever seen those character interviews? Those 20 question sheets to build a biographical dossier on a character? What's the favorite food and where did their daddy touch them when they were little? Those things get used like fucking curry spice to smother the flavor of shit meat. That's why you will get scenes where the put upon self-insert stares at herself in the mirror and lists off all her features in one statement of fact after the next. Telling these people to delete that all for being 'passive voice' is doing the world a favor.

3/?

[Anonymous No.21880595]

>>21880547
Let's assume you, reader, are a more competent writer. I'm going to bet you've fucked up ambiguous pronouns before.

>Benedict kicked the door shut and threw his red coat upon the bed. He limped, the musket ball to this thigh was an unkind gift from the rebels, to the cabinet. Popping open a bottle of '62 red, he poured himself a drink and sank into the chair beside the fire. It was freezing outside, and his betrayal would soon be the death of them all. Washington would see to that.

"It was freezing outside" is simply garbage in more ways than one. Even an advanced writer needs to check what is going to be assumed to be the actor in a sentence because that is based on the preceding flow of ideas. In modern english, we've all used the phrase colloquially and poeple will quickly become un-confused, but you'd never be confused if the order of words was "Outside was freezing"

Perhaps a better passage could have been used to demonstrate the point, but I feel this is an important point to highlight because very often a writer will be interrupted in their writing. Their ideas will falter, or they got called on the phone or something and they sat back down to type some more with a fresh train of thought. In the new train of thought the sentence, with the pronoun, makes perfect sense.... to them. The reader will experience an unbroken flow of ideas and rather than miraculously know the writer stepped away to have a wank then resumed--as you might be able to smooth over in natural dialogue with people in reality--they are going to assume the writer said exactly what they meant to say and if they have to double back and change their interpretation of an ambiguity they are going to be pissed.

Thus, I encourage you to freely use passive voice wherever it prevents confusion. Never ever confuse the reader.

Unless you're the next great literary writer of our time, but why the fuck are you listening to me if you are? I write a goddamn sword and sorcery webnovel for a few hundred people on royalroad. I describe my writing as worth the money. I'm not going to change your life with my stories but you'll be entertained. If you take nothing else from this, I beg people to not buy a craft book or listen to a tutorial video or take anyone's fucking advice unless the advice is self-evidently correct or you have already consumed the so-called teacher's material and you aspire to be like them.

Do not read King's book on writing unless you want to write like King. Don't bow before McKee's book on Story unless you want to make movies like he likes movies. Don't fucking listen to youtubers. Not one of them. Fuck them all, me included, because youtube is so demanding on time and energy that they cannot possibly have brain power left to excell at writing.

/rant

4/4

[Anonymous No.21880610]

>>21880595
Obviously, this was a seat of my pants rant. If you've got questions or counter points fire away. I've been repeatedly accused of having amateur prose, which may or may not be true.

If anyone thinks that effort post was worth some algorithm boosting, I'll link my shit.

[Anonymous No.21880722]

>>21880494
>North marching was Washington

[Anonymous No.21880732]

>>21880610
Link your shit and I'll read it

[Anonymous No.21880741]

>>21880732
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/49395/the-undying-emperor-grand-conquest-fantasy

I've got books on Amazon too, but this is the free one.

[Anonymous No.21880753]

>>21880610

This post was extremely based and logical. Every point you made was valid, and I fully agree about developing your own prose. Buying those how to write books is retarded.

I would read your work but I’m not interested in swords or sorcery.

The authour that I think has the most unique use of active and passive voice and most amazing prose is Jack Kerouac. The prose of On the Road is so chaotic and captivating.

[Anonymous No.21880762]

>>21880753
I'll add him to my wish list. I've had him reccomended to me before. Next for me is Goethe and Agatha Christie.

If you like sci-fi, I've got that too.

[Anonymous No.21880767]

>>21880762

If you got sci fi work I’d be happy to take a look.

[Anonymous No.21880806]

Look…
Passive voice does not develop a action narrator or voice that can then be attached to anything, making it difficult to bind a story together.

Watch. Let’s tell some stories.
#. “Dave could not thread this needle.” The one doing the action is Dave. It does not say anything special about the needle.
#. “You cannot thread this needle.” The one doing the action is you. This says something about you, but also (since the author doesn’t know you) says something about the needle.
#. “One cannot thread this needle.” The one doing the action is anyone but it is not important because, now we are talking about the needle, and not just certain people.
#. “The needle cannot be threaded.” This is the passive voice. But who is doing the threading? In trying to make the story about the needle separate from its story of being threaded, we end up cutting out the part of the story where someone is actually threading it.

Do you see how it leaves you dangling? This lack of being able to pin the narrator of the story to any actor — even if that actor is just reality itself — is disquieting. This makes it hard to integrate the story into the running story of your world being narrated all the time. Passive voice is jarring.

Voice is important. It is why you conjugate verbs (I, we, they, you). It is why gender in language has become problematic. To simply drop the voice out altogether and leave it dangling becomes tiresome.

When to use it?
#. When you are manipulator or a grifter, like a lawyer arguing who doesn’t want the story pinned to his client. “The gun went off!”
#. When you are speaking from an ideological framework, such as mathematics or science, that assumes a reality narrator, and takes that view that is irrespective of actors. “The solution is titrated to form amines.”
#. You wish to unsettle.

Good prose develops a narrator -- first person, second person, and all the flavors of third person. Why would you WANT to abandon that narrator development with passive voice?

[Anonymous No.21880807]

>>21880767
I can't figure out how to link my Amazon author page without the spam filters stopping me, but you should be able to search Infinite Money Glitch by James Krake. That's one of my four available self-pubs.

[Anonymous No.21880831]

>>21880494
>>Washington was marching north. (Active)
>North was marched by Washington. (Passive)

It doesn’t make sense because you’ve used “march” intransitively and “north” is acting as an adverb which can have no sense of agency. A better way of comparing these would be
>Washington marched his army north.
>The army was marched north by Washington.

>His coat was blue. (Passive)
>His blue coat kept him warm. (Active)
The first sentence is not passive. It’s just a copular sentence followed by the adjective blue. The passive voice construction requires a “be” verb followed by the past participle form of the “action” verb.
>The blue coat was worn by him.
>He wore the blue coat.

[Anonymous No.21880850]

>>21880831
You seem to be more technically correct than me, but in doing so you've stepped away from the amateur mistakes that actually dredge up the discussion in the first place. Choosing between your sentences is more about the order of linking ideas rather than "Oh shit man, what are you doing??"

[Anonymous No.21881367]

>>21880595
>>21880610
Fun read. Please do post your shit although I can't promise I'll stick around d to read genre fiction

[Anonymous No.21881439]

>>21881367
see >>21880741
>>21880807

[Anonymous No.21881548]

[Anonymous No.21881562]

>>21880449
Forgot to close the circle on why there's no money.

The big buckets of money are
1. Porn for women (romance)
2. Self-help (intellectual masturbation)
3. Non-fiction/History (you're not smart enough)
4. Classics, Canon, Public Domain, etc. (You will die a nobody)
5. My favorite (e-)celebrity wrote a book (You are a nobody)
6. Wish Fulfillment

The options to a new writer are shockingly limited. Fact of the matter is that no new voice is going to make a splash in the literary scene because of fart huffing. Without an established presence you can't make a presence and defend your work, which means the only way into the economic machine is to church out some 10 book long litRPG wish-wank off fest about pounding tight pussy and slaying monsters.

Wish all you want that it were any other way, but the readers decide what sells and there's too many people fighting with each other and with half-century old 'classics' for the limited desire to read a tight drama.

Doesn't help that people are becoming illiterate and don't read as much anymore.

[Anonymous No.21881565]

>>21878734
Op, your exaggerating for attention and passive voice is used all the time in context where it's appropriate.

It just tends not to be best for informal narratives. If you are writing a story and not a history textbook then you probably shouldn't use passive voice.

[Saddamanon No.21881567]

>>21881565
a nigger is been by you

[Anonymous No.21881607]

>>21881562
It seems like you are implying anything that isn't a ultra serious drama novel somehow isn't valid

[Anonymous No.21881627]

>>21881607
Sorry to imply that, I actually quite like the wish fulfillment genre, and a great deal of classics are genre works. Robert E Howard? Big fan. He was my direct inspiration for a lot of my webnovel.

I do think romance and self-help are worthless however. It causes me pain that Coleen Hoover was like half of all books sold in America last year, because she cultivated a cult that consumes her okay-ish smut.

If you're trying to write cozy mystery detective novels you are competing with so many other people for so few readers that you will make more money writing a book on how to write cozy mysteries than you'll actually make on your books because so many people jump from one craft resource to the next desperatly thinking JUST ONE MORE will be the difference.

When the best way to become a full time author is apparently catering to Wuxia cultivation fans and setting up a Patreon? Something has gone terribly wrong with the industry.

[Anonymous No.21881634]

>>21881627
It's the same as other legacy media. Tradpub is plagued by conceitedness and insiderism, not a mainstream as much as it is a sprawling knee-height swamp of rotting carcasses and bottomfeeders. Those independents and random fuckos making sub-minwage on Patreon are small freshwater creeks flowing well away from that horrid swamp.

[Anonymous No.21881650]

>>21881634
You're not wrong, it's just very sad.

I want to entertain people and make an impact, but that's a very long road to walk nowadays. I've got some plans though, and I have written books already that people enjoy.

[Anonymous No.21881666]

>>21878734
One of my favorite examples of the passive voice being used well is from Dante's La Vita Nuova:
>She was called Beatrice by many who did not know what it meant to call her this.
I don't know how it is in the original Italian, but I quite like it in the English, and I'm assuming it was similar. Notice how it wouldn't sound as good in the active:
>Many called her Beatrice, who did not know what it meant to call her this
The whole sentence is fucked up by that change. It shifts the emphasis, and ruins the flow. The word "many" doesn't really fit anymore, and worst of all, the relative clause gets separated from the noun it modifies. The only way to fix that would be:
>Many, who did not know what it meant to call her this, called her Beatrice.
Which is even worse. I just can't think of a way to put this sentence into the active without taking away its beauty.
And it even has the "by", since a lot of people say that passive is okay so long as you don't have a "by".

[Saddamanon No.21881714]

>>21881666
based and true but
>666
Satantrips

Other dumb advice:
>long sentences bad
>semicolons bad

[Anonymous No.21881794]

>>21881714
>mfw 143 semicolons in my thus-far 40k-word WN

[Anonymous No.21881864]

>>21880610
>>21880494

>North was marched by Washington. (Passive)
>His coat was blue. (Passive)
>In the middle of the room was the corpse of his John Wick's dog.

Not a single one of the sentences you called "passive" is in passive voice. I can't believe you actually wrote this much text about something you don't even remotely understand.

[Anonymous No.21881875]

>>21881864
Retards literally think the word "was" makes something passive unfortunately

[Anonymous No.21881960]

>>21881864
>>21881875
>y-your wrong!
>doesn't elaborate

[Anonymous No.21882076]

>>21881960

In active voice, the grammatical subject is the agent that performs an action. Conversely, in passive voice, the grammatical subject is the target of the action. Here are some actually correct examples:

>Active voice: I fucked Anon's mother.
>Passive voice: Anon's mother was fucked by me.

>Active voice: My throbbing cock obliterated her asshole.
>Passive voice: Her asshole was obliterated by my throbbing cock.

Compare these to the incorrect "passive voice" examples in Anon's rant.

>Washington was marching north. (Active)
>North was marched by Washington. (Passive)

This one is grammatically incoherent. "Was marching" in the first sentence is intransitive; there is no "object" that is "being marched." The sentence therefore can't be made passive. However, Anon configured his example as if "north" is the "object being marched," when in fact it's an adverb. The "passive" sentence is nonsense derived from Anon's misunderstanding of the first sentence's grammar.

>His coat was blue. (Passive)
>His blue coat kept him warm. (Active)

This "passive" is at least a coherent sentence, but it isn't passive. It's active. Anon saw the word "was" and assumed the sentence was passive, because "was" is used as a linking verb in passive constructions (e.g., "Anon's mother was fucked by me"). However, the "was" in this sentence isn't a linking verb, but the main verb of the sentence. Interestingly, his "active" example here is also active, but more detailed, which makes me think he's mistaken active/passive voice as a matter of prose styling rather than an actual grammatical concept.

>In the middle of the room was the corpse of his John Wick's dog.

This example is the same. It's in active voice, and there is no agent/target pair to invert, but Anon assumed passivity when he saw "was."

>>21881960

Please don't take writing advice from someone who writes with absolute confidence on a topic about which he is 100% factually incorrect, especially when that topic is basic English grammar.

[Anonymous No.21882101]

>>21882076
Anon, I don't know how to explain this to you well, but the above rant was about online advice on writing, it was not a grammar lesson

[Anonymous No.21882123]

>>21882076
>>21880741

[Anonymous No.21883356]

>>21882076
So now that I'm not ankle deep in whisky, allow me to respond.

First of all, the rant was written in the context of how-to-write advice which spawned "le passive bad", the point of this thread. I aimed to address why the advice has stuck around and how it's actually useful to some people. It being useful is why it has stuck around, but the immediate limitation of its usefulness is why people are confused about it.

The aim was to help people see through critique from such people because even idiots will accurately find flaws. They'll complain about stuff that isn't flaws too, which can be baffling.

>>21881875
This anon is correct. The people who parrot "don't use passive voice" literally think any sentence with was in it is passive and will try to correct it. There's also a ton of people who hump Stephen King's shit so hard they think "Washington was marching north" should be edited to "Washington marched north" as if those are synonymous. That was why I wrote that particular sentence. I wanted to make a point that was can be used in an active sentence.

I wrote the rant based on many years of workshopping amateur writing and I have seen horrors you wouldn't ever imagine unironically shared as their best attempt to write. Nobody, not one single person that I have ever met, who can actually write believes "passive voice is bad". That doesn't mean it doens't help some people though.

[Anonymousn No.21883393]

No style guide cautions against the passive voice without acknowledging that there are of course situations in which it comes in very handy. But try editing copy professionally and you'll see how often and how simply a text can be improved by making the subject of an action explicit and upfront.

[Anonymous No.21883509]

Passive voice is good.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kcbHKbvwCnU&t=1s

[Anonymous No.21883543]

>>21878770
English mf, do u speak it?

[Anonymous No.21883687]

>>21880449
>Passive voice is slower than active voice.
WRONG
At a paragraph level passive voice is wonderful for making things go faster since you can skip obvious information and better control reader focus. For example assume we're reading about people who have already arrived at Lord Fitzlebottom's Manor and are surrounded by servants, which line is better?

>Food was served after midnight. (passive)
or
>The waiters served the food after midnight. (active)

I would argue in most cases the passive clause serves you better because 1) we probably already know there are servants around so redundant to keep bringing them up and 2) the servants are presumably not the focus of the story - by using passive here we are sort of shrouding them and keeping the focus on the food. Passives in general emphasize WHAT OCCURED/STATE OF BEING, whereas Active sentences tend to emphasize the verbing/doer of the action. Neither is incorrect, but it is a powerful tool to know what you want your reader to focus on.

Read/watch Pullum on Passives, sometimes a passive sentence adds 1 or 2 very small words but it is not really a pacing consideration.

>>21880547
Agree with all this desu