Passive voice: the bane of all who use the grammar checker
in Microsoft Office Word. Every time I use it, it comes up with a little green
line under it saying “passive voice, please revise”. As if I didn’t know I was
using it? How could I not? Passive voice is a wonderful invention that is used
all the time by people that either need to hit a certain word count, want to
phrase something a different way, or simply like the way it sounds. Personally,
I like to use it because it can be more specific as to the way in which something
happens. In another entry of mine, the one in which I wrote a story using the
words that have the root “nem”, passive voice is necessary at one point to
convey the meaning I wanted to give.
“The Council of Nem was nationally recognized by the
Emperor JaJar of Sapio, who held a gala a short time later to honor the Lead
Director of Nemian Internal Policy, the guy that first came up with the idea to
hold the tournament.” This was the original sentence in the story, which I
kept, although Word’s grammar check did its best to get me to change it to
something like the following re-wording. “The Emperor JaJar of Sapio
nationally recognized the Council of Nem, who held a gala a short time later to
honor the Lead Director of Nemian Internal Policy, the guy that had first came
up with the idea to hold the tournament.” This has a completely different
meaning, at least to me, so it’s no wonder that using passive voice is sometimes
necessary to get a point across in the way it’s intended.
(287 words)
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