What Every UX Writer Needs to Know About Passive Voice

Aaron S. Raizen
UX Planet
Published in
7 min readApr 19, 2020

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The following comes from a segment in the UX Writing Academy’s training program called Lexically Speaking. In it, we explore the writing aspects of UX writing — grammar, style, mechanics, typography and more.

The year is 1776. The place, Philadelphia. A young Virginian has been tasked with drafting a document of enormous historical significance — a task he did not want to take. His country is at war with the most powerful empire in the world from which it intends to declare independence. Surely, this document calls for clear, powerful, assertive language. The gravity of the situation weighs on him as he puts quill to paper and begins to write …

We’ll come back to this story later and I promise it’s going to make sense. But first, let’s turn to the matter at hand—the passive voice.

People talk about passive voice as if it’s nothing short of a scourge upon the very soul of the English language. When I get the chance, I like to ask people why they think we should avoid it. The response is invariably something like “Well, it makes your writing weak.” OK. In what way weak? Like, it can’t do a single push-up, it needs to go to the gym weak? How does it make writing weak? Sometimes I’ll hear or read something like this: “Well, passive voice uses the object of the verb as the subject of the sentence” followed by a smug grin.

And it’s true — that is how the passive construction works. Yet I’ve never gotten a clear answer as to how that particular construction somehow makes language “weak.” This is probably because, well, it doesn’t! So why such fierce aversion to the passive voice? Let’s look at the history.

Two major factors seem to have contributed to the current popular thought on passive voice. The first is that ubiquitous style guide, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which we’ll refer to here as S&W. For whatever reason, S&W became the go-to manual for writers.

In the minds of many, it has a word-of-God level of authority that seems to stem mainly from its popularity. It’s concise, it’s easily digestible, but it’s also a hundred years old and full of terrible, ridiculous advice based on prescriptivist grammar rules and various other follies and fallacies. From what I’ve gathered, S&W seems to be the origin of the modern anti-passive voice movement.

So let’s take a peek inside The Elements of Style. Rule 14: Use the active voice. Here’s the explanation:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:

I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.

This is much better than

My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.

S&W then explain that the second sentence is “less direct, less bold, and less concise.” That’s certainly true. What they fail to mention is that it’s also something no sane person with a command of English would ever say. It’s a bit of a straw man argument.

But the best part is, contrary to rule 14, S&W state: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” And when would that be? Here’s their example:

The dramatists of the Restoration are little esteemed today.

Modern readers have little esteem for the dramatists of the Restoration.

The first would be the preferred form in a paragraph on the dramatists of the Restoration, the second in a paragraph on the tastes of modern readers.

They continue with more examples, some of which don’t even use the passive. So how did we go from S&W’s nuanced, if poorly argued stance on the passive, to today’s “OMFG passive voice is literally the devil”? Enter, Bill Gates. OK, not actually Gates, but rather Microsoft Word’s grammar check.

Photo by Vincent Botta on Unsplash

I remember the days before word processors. Tough times. I think I was in high school when I made the switch to Word on my 486. Suddenly, everything I wrote was full of passive voice suggestions, which I ignored, mainly because I didn’t know what that meant.

But Microsoft’s Word spread far and wide, and with that spread, the masses became aware of this “grammatical error” which they never would have thought about otherwise. And they believed it to be an error because Microsoft felt like a valid authority, just like S&W did.

Put this together with people's propensity toward black and white thinking (active=good, passive=bad) and then sprinkle in some internet echo-chamber reinforcement, and there you have it. People everywhere feeling strangely guilty about using the passive construction and not really knowing why.

Compounding the problem, modern grammar checkers are reinforcing this misguided hostility toward the passive. I love Grammarly — I use it every day. But Grammarly still alerts users to a “Passive Voice Misuse” which is unfortunate, because it has no way of knowing whether it’s an appropriate use or not.

The Hemingway Editor takes a more accepting approach. It seems to suggest using the passive no more than 15 times per 1000 words. That sounds reasonable, though I don’t know where they got those numbers. And whether or not that number is reasonable depends on what those 1000 words happen to be about; some subjects lend themselves more naturally to the passive construction than others.

Then you have the AI-based tool Writer.com, which doesn’t try to correct passive voice usage at all and focuses instead on clarity settings. Magic!

So here’s the deal. Passive voice is part of English (and many, many other languages) and is a perfectly valid way to construct a sentence. Why would it have developed if there was something inherently wrong about it? As UX writers who are looking to write in a conversational style, we absolutely need it. English speakers use the passive construction ALL THE TIME and if you go out of your way to avoid it, you’ll often sound unnatural.

The passive has several vital roles in communication and engages the reader in ways the active voice doesn’t. Using it carefully will allow you to control the focus of your readers’ attention. “Martin kicked the ball” creates a very different image in a reader’s mind than “the ball was kicked.” If the passage is about Martin the soccer player, then you want to focus the reader’s attention on him. But if the passage is about a soccer ball, then who kicked it may not be relevant information, making the passive preferable. A general rule is to use it when you want to emphasize the person, place, or thing affected by the action. Think about what the reader needs to know or doesn’t need to know. Or, just trust your intuition and use it where it sounds right.

And sure, overuse of the passive voice could start to sound odd, so I’m not saying writers don’t need to be aware of it at all. But there are countless things we need to be aware of in our writing and overuse of nearly anything could be problematic.

In the world of UX, I’ve noticed a lot of companies are adding “use the active voice” to their guidelines. Then they go on to give examples that aren’t related to the question of active vs. passive. What they mean to be saying is “use the imperative tense,” particularly on CTAs. While that’s often good practice for CTAs, it doesn’t relate to something like “Your account has been updated” vs “We updated your account.” Here, the sentence is about the account, not about some undefined “we” making the passive the better choice. Plus, the passive construction sounds much more natural and conversational here.

Finally, passive voice does not equal “weak” language — that’s a myth. Let’s go back to Philadelphia to finish the story.

The young Virginian was none other than Thomas Jefferson, who was drafting the United States Declaration of Independence. Here’s the opening of the preamble:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This is a powerful sentence. It is direct, bold, and vigorous — and it uses passive voice twice! (In fact, that whole paragraph uses the passive six times.) But the grammatical construction — whether or not the subject is an object of a verb — has nothing to do with its strength; it’s the words that make it strong. Notice, they don’t “believe it’s true that,” they “hold self-evident truths.” They are “endowed with unalienable rights.” This is where the strength of the writing lies.

I hope that the next time you’re tempted to rewrite something because, heaven forbid, it’s in the passive voice, you’ll remember young Jefferson standing brave against the might of the British Empire. My advice? Just trust your ear.

In the course, this discussion continues with Gandalf, why you shouldn’t take writing advice from 17th-century mathematicians, and how “needless words” aren’t always so needless. But that content is reserved for our UX Writing Academy students. More info here if you’re interested.

Credit to Professors John McWhorter and Steven Pinker who informed many of the ideas presented here. I highly recommend McWhorter’s podcast Lexicon Valley, and Pinker’s style guide The Sense of Style.

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