Google has a style guide for technical writers and from what I’ve read, it’s pretty good. It’s short and sweet on the details, but that’s fine. The guide is direct and it’s not meant as a general writer’s guide.
But it makes comments on the passive voice, so you can probably guess what’s coming.
First, the good stuff. The guide correctly identifies the passive voice. Progress! The guide doesn’t identify all the ways that the passive voice can appear, just the BE + past participle way, but it gets that way right. Good job, Google.
Then the guide gives advice that writers should use the active voice instead of the passive voice. This is where Google’s guide makes some questionable claims. It says:
I have never heard about that first bullet point. How do they know that people convert sentences in their head? How could they even know? If Google has that kind of technology, they need to give it to linguists. It would answer a lot of questions in our field.
I guess we could say that active voice is the default or canonical way of forming a sentence in English, but this is a categorical decision made to aid grammatical analysis. We don’t know whether people mentally convert passive voice to active voice. Do they do that with other types of clauses? Do they convert questions or imperatives? What about the middle voice – do they convert those clauses too? Probably not.
Passive voice does not necessarily obfuscate ideas, nor does it turn sentences on their head. You can obfuscate sentences with the passive voice, but you can also do that with the active voice. Lazy writers like to scapegoat the passive voice for obfuscation, but smarter people know better. Check it: which one of these sentences would you say is the most obfuscatory?
Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns.
Someone shot Mr. Burns.
Mr. Burns was shot.
I would say the middle one is the most unclear, but it’s in the active voice. The third sentence, which is the passive one, doesn’t tell us who shot Mr. Burns, but there’s a reason that people write sentences like that. Because sometimes one element is more important than the other. We’ll get to this more in a bit, but for now, consider:
Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy.
President John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.
President John F. Kennedy was shot.
Not for nothing, the passive voice sentence is the shortest one here. But more importantly, President Kenndy is more important than the person who shot him!
Let’s keep the third bullet point in mind while we look at the next piece of advice.
The Google Technical Writing Manual says
The Google Technical Writing Manual then takes some digs at academic writing (in a section marked “optional”):
So they start off with a swipe at “certain scientific research reports”. But which ones? I thought we were supposed to be joining “the quest for clarity” smh. Let’s think about this for a minute though. If the passive voice is used more often in scientific publishing, could there be a reason for that? Look again at the example sentences the Google manual gives:
- It has been suggested that…
- Data was taken…
- Statistics were calculated…
- Results were evaluated…
They claim that we don’t know who is doing what to whom, but with the exception of the first example, this is clearly not true. When a research report says “Data was taken…,” we know who took the data. It was the researchers! The authors of the research report, they took the data! Why on earth would it be anyone else? And if it was, the authors would say that. “Statistics were calculated…,” “Results were evaluated…” The authors are calculating the statistics and evaluating the results. That’s how research reports work. And the statistics and results are more important than the authors. That’s the objectivity in scientific research that the Google manual is clamoring for. Neither the active voice nor the passive voice versions of these examples is more or less objective:
- Active: We took the data… vs. Passive: Data was taken…
- Active: We calculated the statistics… vs. Passive: Statistics were calculated…
- Active: We evaluated the results… vs. Passive: Results were evaluated…
If the author(s) of this Google manual weren’t so hung up on hating the passive, they would notice that three of their four examples sentence disprove their point. Instead they just look silly.
So let’s edit the advice from the Google manual for clarity and truth:
Do we know who is doing what to whom? No Yes. Does the passive voice somehow make the information more objective? No, but neither does the active voice.
Read a book, Google
Look, here’s what’s really going on. It’s not about being bold, or who is doing what to whom, or any of that. It’s about the way English works. Huddleston and Pullum explain:
In English there is a broad preference for packaging information so that SUBJECTS REPRESENT OLD INFORMATION. […] while [active and passive clauses] normally have the same core meaning, they are NOT FREELY INTERCHANGEABLE. They differ in how the information is presented, and one important factor in the choice between them concerns the status of the two major NPs as representing old or new information. (2005: 242-243)
You can’t just switch every passive clause into an active one. You will sound strange. Because you will be disobeying the rules of English. The quote above is from a book called A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. This is basic stuff. But it does require that the writers of the Google Technical Writing Guide read a book about grammar before making proclamations about it. And that’s asking too much, I guess.