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For years, I blindly obeyed SEO plugin warnings to eliminate every passive sentence. In forcing an actor into every single verb, I realized far too late that I was dragging the reader's attention away from the real point.
Ever since digital writing assistants entered our workflow, we have developed an obsession with the 'green light.' We twist and bend our prose just to get that green checkmark in panels like Yoast or Grammarly. One of the areas where these tools are most unforgiving is the passive voice. For years, I blindly obeyed warnings urging me to 'avoid passive sentences.' In forcing an explicit actor onto every single action in my copy, I realized far too late that I was actually diverting the reader's attention away from the core event.
There was a period when using the active voice in every newsletter issue became a matter of pride for me. Instead of writing 'The system was updated,' I wrote 'Our engineering team updated the system.' Why didn't this work? Because the reader's only concern was whether the system was operational—not whether Ahmet or Ayşe wrote the deployment script. By forcing the actor onto center stage, I drowned the reader in unnecessary noise and ruined the rhythm of the piece. The passive voice is not a grammatical flaw waiting to be fixed; it is a precision lens adjustment that pans the camera away from the actor and onto the action or object itself.
It shifts the spotlight from who performed the action to what was done or who received it. The passive voice is a strategic tool designed to direct attention where it belongs whenever the action or the recipient carries more weight than the agent.
We have all heard George Orwell's famous maxim from 'Politics and the English Language': 'Never use the passive where you can use the active.' Yet that guideline was written as a defense against political manipulation and obfuscation, not as an absolute grammatical commandment for every genre of writing.
When the recipient of an action is more important than the one performing it, reach for the passive voice. In scientific and technical copy, forcing the active voice (such as writing 'We conducted the experiment' instead of 'The experiment was conducted') adds unnecessary personalization, erodes objectivity, and burdens the reader with cognitive clutter. If you are writing an incident post-mortem, saying 'The server was rebooted' instead of 'Our engineers rebooted the server' keeps the spotlight squarely on the resolution of the incident.
When the actor is irrelevant, unknown, or obvious to everyone, forcing the active voice makes the sentence clumsy. We say 'The suspect was arrested,' not 'The police arrested the suspect.' The context already tells us who carries out arrests. Forcing an active construction in these scenarios turns sentences into heavy, redundant reading.
There are, however, moments where the passive voice is dangerous and genuinely counterproductive. In crisis communication, passive phrasing ('Mistakes were made') is frequently used to deflect responsibility; when readers catch this maneuver, brand trust erodes rapidly. Moving the camera away from the actor when accountability is demanded weakens the prose and breeds skepticism. Writing 'An error occurred' sounds like evading ownership. This is precisely where the passive voice should never be used.
When drafting a sentence, ask yourself: Does the reader need to know who did this, or simply that it was done? If the answer is the latter, use the passive voice without hesitation. Directing your reader's focus is infinitely more valuable than chasing a green light in an editing panel.