#passive voice

There’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice—you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis—and I see nothing objectionable in, say, “The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out.” Since the point of interest is the cleanness of the house and not the identity of the cleaner.

This translation involves the use of the antipassive. You probably know what a passive voice is. But have you heard of the antipassive?

A passive essentially takes an object of a clause and makes it a subject, for a variety of reasons, including moving the focus, eliminating the need to explicitly state what would be the subject of the active voice version of the clause. So “Namí ate the apricot” would become “The apricot was eaten (by Namí)”

The antipassive essentially does the opposite. It takes a transitive verbal phrase and makes the *object* either disappear or demotes it to an oblique role. So what is necessarily a transitive verb otherwise, like “scare”, becomes intransitive. So it’s a little like saying “Namí has been scaring”. Only in English, that’s not really a good clause, so I translate it as “Namí has been scaring people”. With this indeterminate word, “people”, it doesn’t really matter WHO Namí has been scaring, it’s anyone and everyone who goes down by the river, potentially. The point is Namí and the fact that she’s acting weird.

Languages that have an ergative-absolutive verbal alignment are particular likely to use antipassives. This is because, in this type of alignment, the agent of a transitive and the subject of an intransitive are treated differently (the latter is treated syntactically like the patient of a transitive). Thus, the agent (ergative) gets promoted to absolutive and thus the former patient is demoted and less emphasized. The opposite is true for passive voices—they tend to be common in nominative accusative languages.

To clarify, active voice is when the subject is performing the action, experiencing the emotion, etc. and passive voice is when the subject undergoes the action, emotion, etc. These basically come up in sentence structure as a way to make a character feel like they have more or less agency

The way to identify the difference, or at least the way I’ve used for years, is to put ‘by zombies’ after the verb. If it’s coherent, it’s passive voice, and if it isn’t, it’s active. Let’s use some examples:

“She was killed (by zombies)” -> coherent, passive

“Zombies killed (by zombies) her” -> incoherent, active

And the effect of these techniques in your writing is to make the subject read as though they have more or less agency depending on the situation, even without changing what’s going on in the scene. Neither is necessarily better than the other, it’s all about utilisation in the correct circumstances

Now some longer, Tumblr friendly examples, and you can try and practice identifying active and passive voice if that can help you:

“You kneel before my throne unaware that it was built on lies”

“It may not be that deep, but the ground is soft and I’m ready to dig”

“I hope I make it a little softer here for someone”

“If they won’t match your effort, they don’t want to be in your life”

So, writing advice almost always says to avoid passive voice. You don't want to say "The cookies were baked" when you can say "She baked cookies." The latter gives you more of an image, more of an emotional connection or response.

However, like a lot of writing advice, the rule has exceptions.

I could say "The rug hid a trap door." I could say "The trap door hid under a rug." OR...I could say, "The trap door was hidden under a rug." That last one is passive, but also better.

In that example, we don't really care about what the inanimate objects are "doing." We're personifying them just for the sake of avoiding passive voice, and the result sounds a bit weird. But the passive construction tells us that someone did the hiding. Which makes a reader's mind perk up and wonder who. And why.