In my day job I sometimes need to check other people’s written English for accuracy and clarity. One common stylistic change that I often suggest is to rephrase in the active voice. In my view, English-users often use the passive voice where the active would be clearer, particularly where the passive is used incompletely.
For example: ‘You were told x y z’.
In my opinion, in reporting facts, this is a poor structure because it does not say who told ‘you’ x y z, i.e. it is incomplete. The writer could render it complete thus: ‘You were told x y z by your doctor’. However, this too is a poor structure because there is no reason to put these facts in the passive voice.
The preferred option would be: ‘Your doctor told you x y z’. This makes it clear that it was the doctor who did the telling, that it was you whom he told, and that he told you x y z.
That said, the passive may be appropriate, for example if the writer doesn’t know the identity of the active subject (the doctor), or for narrative effect, e.g. ‘The cat was sick of being chased all day by the mouse’ is more effective than ‘The mouse chased the cat all day and the cat was sick of this’. Or occasionally it may be appropriate to use the passive in order deliberately to conceal facts (where ambiguity is the purpose of communication, which should be seldom).
I’ve already looked at some of the previous posts of Spanishdict relating to the passive in Spanish and note that it can be rendered using ‘se + indicative verb’, or ‘ser + past participle’ or even ‘estar + past participle’.
My questions are as follows:
- How common are the ‘ser’ and ‘estar’ forms ?
- Does the passive lead to the same kind of confusion as in English ?
- Should the past participle be made to agree with the passive subject if feminine or plural ?
