You can also read this essay in Brave the Castle.
I learnt one of my most beloved writing lessons at law school.
The last year of law school is devoted to polishing law students into lawyers. Lawyers are at least supposed to write in clear, plain English.
To teach us this necessary skill, my teacher Margaret Castles showed me and my class mates a list of sentences written along these lines:
- The pages were stapled.
- The note was filed.
- The memo was written.
Marg asked us “What do all these sentences have in common?” The answer: the actions they described could all be done by a zombie:
- The pages were stapled by a zombie.
- The note was filed by a zombie.
- The memo was written by a zombie.
I giggled and I giggled. I was tickled by her fun tool that I knew I’d use from that day on in my writing.
I’d striven for a long time to write in the active rather than the passive voice. The active just sounded better. I never wanted to be passive much less let my writing be passive. My favourite writers also wrote in the active voice. My literary heroes are Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett and their masculine and hardboiled prose is the language of bull fights and gun fights. It’s as active as you get.
Detecting the passive voice and rooting it out of my writing was hard. I didn’t have a magnifying glass for it but then Marg gave me one. Now, when I edit my short stories, film reviews, and essays to weed out any passivity that’s crept in there, I just ask, “Could a zombie do what’s being done in this sentence?”
Marg’s lesson wasn’t just useful in this strict, utilitarian sense. It also showed me why the passive voice is so foul: it erases whoever’s doing the action. At best, this makes for dull prose. You can’t tell stories of heroes slaying dragons and claiming the dragon’s treasure in the passive voice. “The dragon was run through with the sword and the treasure was claimed.” The story becomes a dead mass of inert objects, not unlike the opening scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse. At its worst, the passive voice is a scoundrel’s cloak. It conceals who’s doing and done what. The passive voice is the ultimate weapon for the crook trying to evade responsibility. The absence the passive voice creates is a hole for rats to hide in.
I urge you all: fill in the hole. Take up arms against the zombie word apocalypse.
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 
I learned this lesson at a writer workshop. One of my reviewers circled every use of the word to be with red pen. The page looked like it had measles. It’s hard, but the result matters.
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