Passive voice

The passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject receives the action rather than performing it, formed with a form of 'be' plus a past participle: 'the report was submitted'. It is a choice, not an error.

The numbers

What the passive voice is

In a passive sentence the subject receives the action instead of performing it. The construction is a form of 'be' plus the past participle of a transitive verb, with the doer optional: 'the report was submitted (by the analyst)'. Grammarly's guide is blunt that the passive is not grammatically incorrect; the real complaint is overuse, which can make writing sound jargony, impersonal or evasive.

The passive is the right tool when the doer is unknown ('my car was stolen yesterday'), when the receiver matters more than the actor, or by scientific convention ('the rat was placed in a T-shaped maze'), where the experiment, not the experimenter, is the topic.

How much passive is normal, by genre

Measured rates vary widely by genre. In typical prose, a Merriam-Webster count reported by linguist Geoffrey Pullum puts about 13% of transitive verbs in the passive; Pullum's own sample count found about 17%. At the formal end, Leong's 2014 corpus study of 60 research articles across six science journals found about 30% of all clauses were passive, and an earlier study of 90 medical papers found a median of 20-26% of sentences, with some articles at 46-47%.

Even the most famous opponent of the passive did not write to his own rule. George Orwell's 1946 instruction 'Never use the passive where you can use the active' appears in an essay that is itself 20-26% passive by Pullum's counts, well above the typical-prose baseline.

The 10% rule has no traceable source

A widely repeated piece of advice says to keep passive constructions under 10% of sentences. We could not find a primary source for that number, and to our knowledge none has ever been produced. Its most visible modern home is Yoast's SEO readability checker, which shows a green bullet under 10% and a red one above 15%, without citing any research for either threshold. The broader anti-passive injunction is older than any percentage: it was commonplace in college writing handbooks of the 1930s and 1940s before Orwell made it famous.

Set the folk rule against the measurements and it collapses: competent published prose runs from the low teens in general writing to roughly a third of clauses in the sciences. The 10% figure is best read as a tool default, not a finding.

Worked example

Count the passive constructions in this four-sentence extract: 'The report was submitted on Friday afternoon. The committee reviewed it over the weekend. Two errors were found in the appendix. The author corrected both before Monday's meeting.'

Sentence 1: 'was submitted', passive. Sentence 2: 'reviewed', active. Sentence 3: 'were found', passive. Sentence 4: 'corrected', active. That is 2 passives in 4 sentences: 2 divided by 4 gives 50% of sentences, five times the folk 10% ceiling. Yet the paragraph reads cleanly, because in sentences 1 and 3 the report and the errors are the topic, and the doers are obvious or unknown.

Count passives to notice your habits, not to hit a quota. A passive earns its place by keeping the topic in the subject position; the percentage alone proves nothing.

Sources

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