Do you know the difference between active and passive voice? I see so many authors struggling to understand the difference, so let’s talk about what makes a sentence active or passive.

Active vs. Passive

In a sentence that’s using active voice, the subject is performing an action. In a sentence that’s using passive voice, an action is happening to the subject.

Active: She flipped the table in her haste to get away from the bee.
Passive: The table was flipped when she tried to get away from the bee.

Active: My cat bites my face at night.
Passive: My face is bitten by my cat at night.

Active: The lawyer drew up the papers last night.
Passive: The papers were drawn up by the lawyer last night.

Notice how the passive sentences require more words than the active ones. Passive voice often involves phrases that start with by.

Generally, if you can, use active voice. Passive voice often leads to clunky, wordy sentences, are often vague, and lack the impact of a more active voice. Ultimately, passive voice is weaker than active voice. With that being said, passive voice is unavoidable sometimes and is fine in moderation. Let me stress that passive voice isn’t wrong. It’s just probably not the best way to express your thoughts.

When to Use Passive Voice

Passive voice is great in some situations. Scientific writing, for one, uses passive voice a lot for its objectivity.

When the action is more important than the subject
After much debate, a rule was passed to allow the use of calculators during the exam.

When the subject isn’t known
My wallet was stolen last week.

To maintain objectivity
A positive correlation between the medicine and higher temperatures was found by four out of five researchers.

To avoid assigning blame
The patient was infected with a deadly disease last week.


Hope this helped clear up the differences! If you find yourself relying on a more passive voice, I challenge you to incorporate more active sentences into your writing and see what happens. If nothing else, that’ll be good practice for forcing you out of your comfort zone.

As always, check back next week for the next blog. If you haven’t already yet, check out last week’s post, En Dash, Em Dash, and Hyphen–Oh, My!