The word 'was' Active or passive

Yes.

‘Was’ is a word that seems to get singled out for a kicking (sits in the corner licking its wounds next to the mighty Adverb, who is crying softly into a tissue) and perhaps that is why the OP was concerned about it. I’m just suggesting that poor use of ‘was’ can sometimes weaken writing and, perhaps, that is why the word is seen as passive (incorrectly).

 

And the vast, vast majority of the time it mis-diagnoses passive voice and those are not actually passive voice. Spelling/style check software is not the arbiter of good style.

This is not what passive voice means. "He was at school" is not passive voice; it is active voice. "Passive voice" has a meaning, and this is not it.

And "He was at school" and "He attended school" do not mean the same thing. If the cop says, "Where was Joe when the murder occurred?" and you say, "He attended school," that is not an answer. Sure, he may habitually attend school, but that doesn't mean that he was in the school building when the murder occurred.

 

Sorry both are active voice.

 

I agree that 'was' is in itself neither passive nor active, but it can be used to help whether a sentence is passive or not as a good deal of passive sentences tend to have a 'was' and a 'by' in them. For example:
"Joe hit the ball."
versus
"The ball was hit by Joe."

 

So, what exactly is wrong, or supposed to be wrong, with passive voice? I'm getting a distinct impression here that there is some kind of argument not to use passive voice - or at least in certain contexts. I am curious as to what the argument might be, correct or otherwise.

 

I think the OP's question has been answered so beyond that, I'd just say who cares? Whether it's called passive voice, active voice or a teapot doesn't matter imo. All that matters is if the wording works in the writing or if it sounds better a different way. The most common problem I've run into with "was" is when it's used so frequently that it distracts me from the story.

 

As far as I can tell it's sort of like the show vs tell argument -- passive voice and telling very much have their uses, but tend to get universally slammed as 'bad writing' because the extreme examples are pretty egregious. So any instance of passive voice gets nitpicked.

At least telling is something that's easier to overdo / do poorly. Actually writing in the passive voice when it's not a natural fit is usually easy to spot as a problem, because it makes your prose stilted and awkward, so I really don't think it's as much a problem as you'd imagine from the way folks get up in arms about it.

 

There's bad writing advice out there that says to never use the passive voice. That comes from better writing advice to avoid using the passive voice where it isn't needed. If the passive voice is over used by an author, the piece, as a result, may be seen by some to be wordy, distanced, and lacking in immediacy. The best advice is really to know the difference between them and know where to use which. A lot of people do this instinctively, but the passive voice pretty prevalent in academic writing and overusing it can make for some pretty terrible fiction.

 

There is a very, very small set of circumstances where passive voice is both (1) likely to be used and (2) bad. (By the way, did you notice that I used passive voice in that sentence?) It's not a very natural way to form a sentence, and therefore if it is used, it's probably used for a good reason. (Look! Passive voice again!)

This is a pretty good discussion:

https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/whats-wrong-with-the-passive-voice/

In addition to corporate bureaucratese, there's also passive voice in bad political speeches, and passive voice in scientific writing. Passive voice in scientific writing is often just fine because it's necessary, but sometimes it squelches over where it's not needed.

 

Thank you for that link, It actually explains quite a fair bit about it and the 'why' behind it. Thanks.

 

I know what passive voice is. That's why I said that my understanding of the question was that it wasn't about passive voice.
Of course, if you replace was in active voice, the meaning will not be the same. But the cases when it can be replaced with another verb fitting into contecxt and having stronger "active" feel are not that rare. Was feels like "just be there, without doing anything", thus it is more "passive" than "be there and do some action". So yeah, to some extent it brings in some "passive" feel while being in active voice itself. Also, you are going to use it in the passive voice structures anyway, so I feel like replacing it with other words where possible in order that it's not overused in text.
I found that in English, articles, pronouns, and verbs like "to be" are very easy to overuse. And am still trying to figure out how you, guys, manage to deal with it ....

 

That's not what it means. I think that you say that you're not a native speaker of English, so I'm afraid I'm not inclined to assume that you have a better understanding of the nuances of that language than I do.

Because they're a core part of the language and therefore they should be used? I'm really lost at the apparent suggestion that we should also avoid using articles and pronouns? It feels a bit like saying that knives, forks, and spoons are overused, and so we should strive whenever possible to eat our soup with chopsticks and our salad with marrow spoons.

How DO you propose that we stop using articles and pronouns?

 

I think @Ksenia Tomasheva is saying that some of the confusion over what's "passive voice" comes from the other usage of passive vs active as related to personality. You can have two sentences in active voice, but one of them makes the character sound more passive (in personality) and the other makes her sound more active.

She also did say it's easy to OVERUSE articles, pronouns, and verbs, rather than use. To be fair.

 

I do tend to lose my temper about the "fear of 'was'", so I suppose I'm being undiplomatic.

But it's absolutely not "was" that makes the character somehow active. The sentence

John was at the center of the group, firing his Whatsit Pistol at the invading aliens.

does not depict John as being more passive than the sentence:

John slept.

The grammatical difference between the two is continuous past tense versus simple past tense. But continuous past tense doesn't make a character more or less active or passive.

 

I was sitting at the desk at school and the book was on the desk.
Vs
I was sitting at a school desk and the book lay on it.

See the difference? The first example is simple, and grammatically correct (i hope so), but it has 2 "was", 3 "the", 2 "desk. In the second example meaning is very close, but even though it has two pronouns and 2 arricles in it, they are different. Second "was" is gone, replaced with another verb.

Lol, I know how it feels, I often do the same. It's not the "fear of 'was", it's a common thing when simple advice to try not overusing the words (any of them) is taken literally "Was" is one of the most frequent words, because it can replace almost everything, and it often helps to think twice and, maybe, pick up another verb instead of it.

 

I strongly second @ChickenFreak 's recommendation of this site: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/whats-wrong-with-the-passive-voice/

It won't solve everybody's problems but the article should make it clear why trying to eliminate all passive voice from your writing is a mistake.

I'd say, in general, to read through what you've written. If any part of the writing seems overly formal or stilted ...then look to the passive voice issue, to see if that is what's at fault. It might be, or it might not. If it is at fault, it's easy to correct.

This is one of those writing issues that may take a while to sink in. It's not incorrect to use passive voice, and some people think it sounds more ...learned?....to use it where it's not needed. A lot of legal/corporate writing takes this turn, and it's not always appropriate or needed. This is what gives passive voice a bad name.

However, as the article points out, there is a time and place to use a passive voice, and sometimes it speeds things up. I particularly liked this example of passive voice: Yesterday I got dumped, fired, burgled and urinated on. If you switched that to active voice, you'd get something like: Yesterday my boyfriend dumped me, my boss fired me, a burglar burgled my house and my dog urinated on me. The point of the sentence isn't who did these things, but who these things were done TO. The passive voice, in this case, is a lot more effective, is certainly not boring, and uses far fewer words. (And 'was' isn't even in there at all!)

 

Well, the first one is grammatically correct, but the meaning is somewhat off. At school, there would be many desks, so you wouldn't sit at "the" desk. You would likely sit at "a" desk or "my" desk. Also, when you change it to "a school desk" it's not longer clear that you're at school. "a school desk" might be a type of desk that's in a different setting.

So the second one is perfectly grammatically correct, but it does change the meaning and it feels somewhat unnatural.

To me, this would sound most natural using a slight variant of the first version. If I imagine someone explaining a situation in great detail (because mentioning that the book was on the desk, rather than just going on to talk about the book, seems like a pretty precise detail), I imagine, say:

"OK, so what happened?"
"I was sitting at a desk at school. The book was on the desk."
"...and?"
"And then it just hopped up and started singing."
"The desk?"
"No, the book."

 

You could also change the desk/book sentence to get rid of the first "was", but you'd be changing the meaning of the sentence if you did so. And I think that's the risk... people write things in a way that makes sense and carries meaning, then follow some weirdo advice about avoiding "was" and end up losing the meaning their sentences originally had.

So, I could write:

I sat at a desk at school and the book lay on the desk.

No "was". But also not the same meaning. And I really don't see any more "activity" associated with "lay" than with "was". Neither is passive voice, and both are lacking physical action.

Hey! Teachers! Leave those "was" alone!

 

@ChickenFreak I'm not really good at coming up with quick examples, but I hope you got the idea. There are almost always the ways to say the same thought in a slightly different way and avoid unnecessary repetitions.
@Tenderiser actually said what I meant better than I did

 

But "avoid unnecessary repetitions" is quite different from "reduce/avoid using 'was'" or "reduce/avoid using articles and pronouns". They're completely different topics. So I don't think I am getting the idea. Repetitions can involve absolutely any word. If you avoided repeating the same verb or noun, you wouldn't summarize that goal as "reduce/avoid using verbs/nouns".

 

@Ksenia Tomasheva - I'm not sure if I'm picking up your point correctly, but it's a mistake to try to relate the grammatical meaning of passive/active to the physical meaning of passive/active. This is where confusion comes in.

Here is a grammatically active voice sentence: Jeff was still asleep on the couch. (A person is rarely more passive than when they're asleep, but in the grammatical sense, Jeff is the subject of this sentence. Because Jeff is performing the sleeping action, it's an active voice sentence.)

Here is a grammatically passive voice sentence: The new Aston Martin got driven around and around the racetrack by its gleeful owner. (The car is probably going at high speed, but the 'by' is a clue that the car—the grammatical subject of the sentence—isn't doing the fast driving. The driver is. The car isn't driving itself. Instead, it is receiving the driving action performed by its gleeful owner, so it's a passive voice sentence.)

Active or passive voice has nothing to do with speed or inactivity in the real world. If you look to these things as markers for active/passive voice, you're going to get in bother.

 

I do realize that, although I didn't realize that the "was Xing" construction had a formal name. You learn something new every day. If I wanted Rob's running to be in the passive voice, I guess that I would have said " His usual three miles was run by Rob" which sounds even weirder, since it implies that Rob's three miles could have been run by somebody else instead if Rob had become unavailable for the job. And I'll just give up trying to recast "The explosion happened" in the passive voice, and leave the task to someone more talented than I.

 

"The happening was exploded" - perfect!