Passive Voice or Active Voice: Which is Better?

     It depends on what you are trying to say, and what you are not trying to say.

Passive Voice:

• "Obviously, some mistakes were made."  (President Reagan, explaining how he and his staff came to break the law by buying weapons from Iran and secretly shipping them to Guatemalan paramilitary forces, while simultaneously refusing to name the persons who broke the law, which would have rendered them vulnerable to indictment.)

Active Voice:

• "My chief legal officer mistakenly told me that the money was mine."  (A hypothetical CEO explaining how she came to have millions of dollars in corporate funds in her private bank account, while neglecting to reveal that she had ordered the lawyer to discover a way in which she might claim the money was hers.

The bold-face noun phrase contains "the agent" who did the telling.  Passive voice constructions obscure agency ("who done it") and concentrate readers' attention on what was done.

• "Five hundred milligrams of sodium pentathol were added to an Erlenmyer flask."

• *"My lab partner, Squiggy, added five hundred milligrams of sodium pentathol to an Erlenmyer flask

• "The narrative known as 'Genesis' was composed between 1400 and 1500 C.E."

• *"God wrote the narrative known as 'Genesis' between 1400 and 1500 C.E."