Sometime this week I’m going to share my story of my very first every pitch session with a literary agent. One, because it made me giddy, but two because it’s one of those things that’s kind of nerve wracking, and I figure it might be helpful to offer a perspective on it in case someone else is about to do the same thing.

But today…active versus passive voice.

I read a fantastic article on this once on writng.com and I wish I could find it now, but I will paraphrase to the best of my ability and hope I don’t do the original author too much injustice.

When I was in yearbook my senior year of high school, my yearbook instructor told us our captions should always be written in passive voice. Whenever possible. He then went on to explain that passive voice was the use of words like ‘was’. As in:

Jimmy threw the ball
versus
The ball was thrown my Jimmy

Here’s the thing…the two statements are not mutually exclusive. They don’t always go together and they don’t always mean the same thing.

Was, had, were, etc are also part of perfect past tense.

So
Jimmy was looking at the ball
vs.
Jimmy looked at the ball

The first statement is not passive voice. It’s perfect past tense. It indicates Jimmy was doing the looking before the narration started. The second sentence indicates Jimmy started looking when the narrative started.

Passive voice is showing the subject being acted upon by the noun instead of the noun acting upon the subject.

Wow, that sounded dry.

Um, more examples:
The cat pounced on the toy is active voice
The toy was pounced on by the cat is passive voice
The cat was pouncing on the toy means the cat started pouncing on the toy before the narrator told us about it.

Or
The college students attended class active
Class was attended by the college students passive
The college students were attending class perfect past tense

And the college students had better be attending class, or I worked on Sunday for nothing 😛

Anyway…

I guess my point is ‘Was’ is not an evil word. Passive voice is also not evil, but you have to know when to use it.

If you want the focal point of the sentence to be the subject, passive voice can be appropriate:

The rock star poster on the wall had darts thrown at it by Sally.
You’d use this passive sentence if you wanted to draw more attention to the poster than to Sally.

Sally was throwing darts at the rock star poster
You’d use this perfect past sentence if you wanted to indicate this had already started happening. Maybe the narrator walked in the room and that’s what they saw. Or, Sally threw the darts in the past, and this is part of a flashback.

Sally threw darts at the rock star poster
This brief, sexy, 90% of your critique partners would suggest it sentence, is only appropriate if Sally starts throwing the darts while the narrator is telling you about it.

So, now that I’ve beat this poor dead horse, I’m going to get back to making sure class can be attended by the students (passively), and probably come back tomorrow with something much less classroom like.

Do you ever use passive voice intentionally?