✍️ English & Grammar · Chapter 6

Active voice and why it matters technically

Passive voice does not just sound weaker. In an incident report it deletes the information you most needed to record.

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The basics

Active voice puts the doer first — "the consumer committed the offsets". Passive voice puts the thing acted upon first and lets the doer drop out — "the offsets were committed".

The problem it solves: passive sentences can quietly delete who or what did something, and still read perfectly well. In everyday writing that's a style issue. In an incident report, a status update or a CV, the missing doer is usually the most important fact: the cause, the owner, or what you personally did.

The mental model: every action has an actor. Active voice forces you to name it; passive lets you skip it. So when you see a passive, ask by whom? If the answer matters, rewrite with the actor at the front. If it truly doesn't — the actor is unknown, or the object really is the topic — passive is fine.

The quick test: add "by zombies" after the verb. If the sentence still works grammatically, it's passive.

Explained

"The offsets were committed before processing completed."

By what? The consumer? A library default? A change someone shipped on Tuesday?

"The consumer committed offsets before processing completed."

Same length. One of them tells you where to go and look.

"Mistakes were made"

It is the most famous sentence in political apology, and it is famous precisely because of what it removes.

Something happened. Nobody did it.

English lets you delete the actor from a sentence, and once deleted, nobody notices it is missing — the sentence still reads fine. That is what makes passive voice genuinely dangerous in technical writing rather than merely inelegant.

In an incident report, the actor is the finding.

Spotting it and fixing it

Passive = a form of be + a past participle, with the actor either after "by" or missing entirely.

was committed     were dropped      is being processed
has been deleted  will be migrated  got rejected

The test: add "by zombies" after the verb. If the sentence still works grammatically, it is passive.

The offsets were committed by zombies. ✓ passive

The consumer committed the offsets by zombies. ✗ active

The fix: find who did it and put them at the front.

| Passive | Active | | --- | --- | | The rows were dropped | The dedup step dropped the rows | | It was decided to retry | We decided to retry | | The job was killed | The OOM killer killed the job | | Errors are being seen | Users are seeing errors |

Rewrite the incident summary

An issue was identified in the nightly pipeline.
It was determined that records had been excluded.
The filter was updated and the job was re-run.
It is believed the data is now correct.

When passive is the right choice

This is not a rule against passive voice. It has three legitimate uses, and knowing them is what separates advice from dogma.

1. The actor is unknown or irrelevant.

The file was corrupted in transfer. — nobody knows by what, and it doesn't matter.

2. The object is genuinely the topic.

The events are partitioned by ride_id. — the events are what you're discussing, not the partitioner.

3. Deliberately removing blame from a person.

The credential was committed to the repo.

That third one is a real judgement call. Blameless postmortems exist because people hide mistakes when reports name and shame — so passive voice can be the humane and effective choice.

But be precise about what you're de-emphasising. Remove the person, keep the mechanism:

✗ A mistake was made in the config.

✓ The deploy config had the staging DSN, and our pre-merge check doesn't validate DSNs against the target environment.

No individual is named, and the actual cause is fully stated. That is the sentence that changes something.

Add "by zombies". If it still reads, it's passive.

In a postmortem the actor is the finding.

Remove the person for blamelessness — never the mechanism.

Gotchas

• "It was decided" — by whom? Decisions need owners or they get relitigated forever
• "Errors are being seen" — by users? in logs? by one person? Say which
• "The data will be migrated" — by whom, by when? A passive commitment is not a commitment
• "It is believed / it is understood" — asserts confidence while hiding its source
• Zombie nouns — the sibling problem: "performed a validation of" instead of "validated". Verbs turned into nouns pad sentences and hide actors just as effectively
• Over-correcting — forcing active voice where nobody did anything makes prose worse. Rules serve clarity, not the reverse

Where this shows up in your career

Your CV. "Was responsible for the migration of the data warehouse" versus "Migrated 40 TB from Redshift to Snowflake, cutting query cost 60%". The active version has an actor, a number and a result — and it is shorter.

Behavioural answers. Interviewers ask what you did. Passive answers make it impossible to tell what you personally contributed, which is fatal in a team-project story. "The pipeline was redesigned" tells them nothing; "I redesigned the ingestion to be idempotent" tells them everything.

Postmortems and design docs. These are the documents senior people actually read. A doc that names causes, owners and evidence is one that gets acted on; a doc full of "it was determined" gets skimmed and filed.

The pattern across all three: active voice forces you to supply the information that makes writing useful. That's why it's worth practising — not because passive is ugly, but because active is harder to write vaguely.

Words to know

In two minutes

• Active voice names the actor first; passive voice puts the object first and can drop the actor entirely.
• Spot passive by 'be/get + past participle', or by adding 'by zombies' after the verb.
• In postmortems the actor is the finding — passive can hide the cause, the owner and the evidence.
• Fix it by asking 'who did this?' and making that the subject.
• Passive is right when the actor is unknown or irrelevant, or the object is genuinely the topic.
• For blameless writing, remove the person but keep the mechanism — make the system the actor.
• On CVs and in interviews, active voice shows what you did, at what scale, with what result.

Test yourself

There are 8 questions, 3 puzzles and 6 recall cards for this lesson in the app — the recall cards come back on later days, just before you would forget.