Earlier (in the column Passive Resistance) I promised a long-awaited distinction between passive voice and passive writing—or more specifically, passive verbs. Passive voice describes a sentence in which the subject receives the action of the verb. By definition, only a transitive verb—one that takes an object—can be in the passive voice.

            Passive verb basically means all forms of “to be.” Don’t check your grammar books on that, though; it’s simply a term that began to circulate in writers’ conferences and e-mail message boards over the past few years.

            Now, a sentence in the passive voice will contain a passive verb:

            Her hands were raised.

But the mere presence of a passive verb does not mean we’re in the passive voice:

            They were happy.

In fact, the dictionary defines be as an intransitive verb; it does not take an object, so it cannot have a passive voice.

            So, what makes be be passive if be can never be in the passive voice? It flows from the dictionary definition of passive: taking no active part; inactive.

By themselves, the be verbs (we’re picking on were here, but they’re all guilty: am, are, is, and especially was) do not convey action but merely static description. And that links them inextricably with one of writingdom’s most sacred directives: Show, don’t tell.

Our above example, They were happy, is telling at its worst: subject-passive verb-adjective. And there’s no simple fix a la passive voice. To remove the passive verb, you must dump the sentence and start over, using action and description to let the reader see the adjective:

They clapped and cheered.

Or . . .

Laughing, they leapt into quadruple somersaults.

Or . . .

As they pushed the bouncy, fuzzy dinosaur down a flight of stairs, they chanted, “Death to Barney! Death to Barney!”

Or . . . ?

Note that this fix would also apply if the original sentence were, “They were excited,” or, “They were overjoyed”? Technically these are passive-voice sentences; but as we saw in an earlier post, the past-tense verbs (excited and overjoyed) behave as adjectives.

Yes, the new sentence will be longer. Sometimes it will go from a sentence to a paragraph, or even several—but the result will give an editor a much better measure of your craft as a writer than noun-passive verb-adjective.

Therein lies the real reason for be’s unofficial dubbing as the “passive” verb: the use of passive verbs usually reflects laziness on the part of the writer. In effect, a writer who frequently uses passive verbs is not taking an active part in his own writing. When you resist the urge to use passive verbs, you force yourself to be more creative.

Maybe now you equate was and were to the Sign of the Antichrist. Maybe you want to eliminate them from your writing. Not a bad idea. But this is no simple Febuary-to-February change. First you have to find them and know how to rewrite without.

So break out the search-and-replace function. Bold every occurrence of was and were in your manuscript. Go! Do it! Click that “replace all” button! Death to every were that ever was!

Oh, yes, and make sure you checked “whole words only.”

Now go fix all the words like awash, showered, wasp, and answered, and we’ll continue this in the next post.