I can’t believe it’s happened again. I was enjoying a perfectly good online workshop on editing, until the presenter insisted that using a form of the verb, “to be”, followed by a past participle, would lead most agents to reject a manuscript for using “passive voice.”
I politely posted a message in the chat (to Everyone) that I begged to differ, and why. She doubled down. Of course, I acquiesced and then later looked at several grammar sources on line to be sure I was correct. I am.
I’m not an English major. But I did receive 798 out of a possible 800 on the English portion of my SAT college entrance exam way back during the Carter administration. Basically, I know stuff. I also have a character flaw that creates anxiety when the stuff I know if wrongly dismissed as, well, wrong.
So, here goes. Active vs Passive voice is not determined by the use of a past participle, a verb ending in -ing. Active vs Passive voice is about sentence structure, not verb construction, and involves the relationship between the subject and the object of the sentence. Furthermore, using passive voice is not always a grammatical error. It is useful for pointing out a problem without directly accusing a person of blame for the problem, as in, “A mistake was made.” Or, Or “All men are created Equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
If you want to use active voice, then you need a Subject to act upon an Object. “Ben made a mistake.” Or, “The Creator of Men endowed them with certain unalienable rights.” As you can see, it is a stylistic choice, and I’m grateful our founding fathers knew it.
Using a form of the verb “to be”, followed by the past participle (-ing) form of the verb, allows the verb to show continuing action, which is something you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, omit from your writing just because some agents and even editors are, ummm, misguided. For example: “I was fishing in the stream when the tornado hit.” That’s a perfectly good way to show simultaneous and continuous action. “While he is writing his book, she is knitting,” is just as correct as “While he wrote, she knit,” and also has a better cadence.
I promise I’ll come up with something more exciting for my newsies.com newsletter. But meanwhile, thank you for listening. I was counting on it.
Laura C. Rader 
8 responses to “Receiving Incorrect Editorial Advice”
You are so right!
Signed, your editor friend
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So, did you share this information with your editor?
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Yes. She wasn’t my editor, just an editor presenting an online workshop. I shared this information and she politely pushed back and said writers should avoid using the verb -ing construction regardless of whether or not it was passive voice or not. Sigh.
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Well, I am a hawk to some of these topics. Using the passive voice I one I use with defined care. I always wince (more than little) when others at our level of writing expertise don’t listen to their own conversation.
Sigh, to, two, too!
s
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Yes!! I’ve never pushed back when told I was wrong, as my basis of knowledge isn’t as strong as yours. (And I only scored a 540, during the same administration!) But it’s always made sense to me. Thanks for posting!! I was looking for good information (not, good information was being looked for!)
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Very interesting Laura! Good for you. I learned something new pursuing this. Have you seen Artful Sentences by Tufte?
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No, I’ll have to check it out.
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The editor in your online workshop is (still, probably), to be polite, misinformed. -ing is not a past participle. Rather, it is the continuous form of the verb, used to indicate that the action was/is/will be ongoing at a particular time and/or in a particular place: “I’ll be teaching my Cultural Anthropology class next Monday.” The past participle “is used in forming perfect and passive tenses and sometimes as an adjective, e.g. looked in have you looked?, lost in lost property.” (I found that explanation by googling.) Note that the explanation uses the past participle (“is used”) for passive voice, which inter alia gets deployed in a lot of scientific writing, where the aim is to describe procedure and results while getting Joe the lab chemist out of the field of vision. Emphasis is on the action, not the agent. Here’s the past perfect in a sentence: “I had been walking for hours and was now tired and thirsty.”
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