The passive voice and weaselly prose?

 I just read a writer, in a complaint about The New York Times, pointing back to the paper’s handling of a fake story: “The most they can muster is a passive-voice headline,” he notes. That headline was “Hamas Fails to Make Case That Israel Struck Hospital.”

George Orwell understood the passive voice, but readings of his essay, “Politics and the English language,” seem to have birthed the idea that “passive voice” names prose that dodges clear statement about a situation.

As it happens, the NYT headline is in the active voice: “Hamas fails to make case,” rather than the passive voice of, say, “Proof is not offered by Hamas.” The Times is obviously dodging clear statement, but the passive voice is only one of many techniques for dodging clarity—witness this headline’s using “fails to make case” as a dodge around saying, “was mistaken” or “lied.”

When Orwell mentioned the passive voice, he was talking primarily about obscured or suppressed agency. And the passive can certainly be used for that: “Mistakes were made” being a classic example.

But the passive voice is only one of many devices for that, and it has many clear uses. What exactly is unclear about ”The crash was caused by the pilot’s error?”

Cloudy agency and the passive voice are like circles in a Venn Diagram. They intersect, but large portions of each lie outside the intersection.

Bad writing teachers have taught several generations of students to equate passives with obscurity—and often to believe that a passive is any sentence with the verb “to be” in it.

The example I saw today goes beyond even this. From cloudy agency—Who Did It?—it’s expanded to “prose that’s trying to hide something.”

The phrase “passive voice” has an actual meaning. (Think of it as inverting subject and object, putting the object as the item of interest and often dropping the subject: from “Bob made mistakes” to “Mistakes were made (by Bob),” or “Someone had broken the bowl” to “The bowl had been broken.”)

The expansion to mean “any cloudy agency”—and now to “any weaselly prose”—is just confusing and unnecessary.