Who did this? How the passive voice hides the subject of your sentence

Editor’s note: This article is a re-run as part of our countdown of top stories from the past year.

Listed among George Orwell’s “swindles and perversions” of writing, it’s important to recognize when you use passive voice and consider if it’s the best choice for your sentence.

What Is Passive Voice?

English sentences usually follow a pattern, subject-verb-object, reflected in “Lauren ate the cookies.” (“Lauren” is the subject. “Ate” is the verb. “Cookies” is the object.) Passive voice follows a different pattern, object-verb-subject, resulting in a sentence like “The cookies were eaten by Lauren.”

This grammatical construction also allows for the subject, the one doing the action, to be dropped from the author’s sentence completely, becoming “The cookies were eaten.”