E-Prime and Passive Sentences

A word before we start: This article belongs to a multi-page series about the E-Prime language. If you haven't already done so, I suggest you consult the list of links in the left column.

On this page, I examine claims about e-prime and passive sentences. You may have read that E-Prime benefits writers by eliminating passive sentences, producing a more direct style. I disagree. In fact, I claim that for beginners, E-Prime tends to increase the number of passive sentences.

E-Prime and the Passive Voice

First, let us note that the English passive voice can use other verbs than the verb "to be". E-Prime therefore allows you to form perfect passive voice sentences, such as:
He got fired by the new boss.

Yet, in practice, we build most of our passive voice sentences around a form of "to be". In e-prime, you cannot say I was chased by a dog. E-Prime therefore nearly eliminates the passive voice.

Passive Voice vs. Passive Sentence

But you don't have to use the passive voice to write a passive-sounding sentence. You only need to take all the action out. How do you do that? By using lots of nouns and noun clauses instead of an action's real subjects and verbs.

For instance, consider:
The arrival of Tom marked the beginning of lunch.
This sentence has no real action because its verb, "to mark", feels like something that happens, as opposed to something you can do. Compare with this:

When Tom arrived, we started to eat.
This sentence feels active for two reasons. First, it has real active verbs and verb clauses: arrived, started to eat. Second, it has real agents in charge of its actions: Tom, we.

Neither of the sentences uses the passive voice, yet one can be called a passive sentence. And both sentences observe the rules of E-Prime.

E-Prime and Passive Sentences

Having read dozens of E-Prime articles and messages by beginners, in my experience, E-Prime promotes passive sentences, at least at the beginning of one's experiments with the dialect.

Indeed, beginners tend to try to translate sentences that use the verb "to be" by changing as few of the original words as they can. Instead of completely rewriting sentences, looking for the real agents and actions behind passive-sounding statements, they tend to use little tricks of language that preserve—and often increase—the passive feeling of a sentence.

For instance, they may translate this flower is beautiful into this flower has beauty, which feels heavier than the original.

Likewise, because they have heard that E-Prime helps them avoid judging, they may translate the problem is difficult into something like the problem seems difficult.

Instead, a more seasoned E-Prime writer would dig out the action and propose things like:
Our customers love this flower.
It took me an hour to solve the problem.
No one has solved the problem yet.

If these examples seem benign, consider the terrifying passive E-Prime sentence I produced for the article on E-Prime and Style—not a far cry from the kind of language you'll find in learned E-Prime anthologies:

Our belief in the supremacy of our reporting objectivity results in our trust of the New York Times's claim to the exhaustiveness of its coverage adequacy.

Who would dare say that this perfectly formed e-prime sentence denotes a clear, vivid, active, graceful style?

From the archives: more about E-Prime and Passive Sentences

Once upon a time, on the now defunct e-prime forum, someone brought up a sentence from the first tome in a collection of rather mediocre E-Prime books: To be Or Not: An E-Prime Anthology. He pointed out that the author had let a "been" slip by. The sentence (on page 9 of the book) reads as follows:

"A more complicated problem arises when a writer selects for the subject of a passive sentence neither a person nor an object (as the innocent victim) but rather an abstraction coined from what would normally have been the verb of the sentence with a suffix such as 'tion' or ment'."

Sadly, the original forum post has disappeared from the face of the internet (the owners of the original e-prime forum took it offline without warning). My reply explained some of my views on e-prime and passive sentences, and it also showcased what I view as effective e-prime writing. I reproduce it here.

Dear (name removed),

I love that you found that phrase in an e-prime anthology!

Not only does it break the very rule it sets out to promote… It shows exactly what not to do when writing in e-prime. Would anyone read it and find it well written, let alone enjoy it? Doesn't it scream "Don't write like this"?

Before we fix the sentence, note how harshly I have judged its author, even though e-prime supposedly helps me not to judge. I love judging in e-prime! I'll throw in a few more judgments for the fun of it:
"The author writes in a stiff, obscure and repulsive style."

To transform the judgment into a statement of taste, we could insert "I find":
"The author writes in a style I find all at once stiff, obscure and repulsive."
I don't mean it, of course...

Now let's talk about the passive voice. In the writing world, everyone and their dog tells us not to use the passive voice. But the author of the quote you sent doesn't see that he (or she) wrote a most passive sentence even while he tried to warn us against it. You don't need to use "to be" to write a passive sentence. You just need to kill all action out of the sentence by removing its real subjects and verbs. Here, instead of the real subject of the sentence ("A writer"), you have an abstraction ("A more complicated problem"). And instead of the real action ("creating problems"), you have a vague, passive verb: "arises". To write in the active voice, we need to bring back the action by digging for the real subject and verb: "Writers create problems".

Now let's see what we can do with the sentence. Sometimes you can't fix a sentence, you have to fix the thought behind it. Without context, I can only try to guess what the author meant. I came up with this:

Sometimes, writers turn the verb of an action into a noun and use that noun as the subject of a passive sentence. For instance, "to combine" becomes "the combination", so that "Jack combines blue with red in many of his paintings" becomes "The combination of blue with red is found in many of Jack's paintings". This technique of turning verbs into nouns creates more complex editing problems.

I broke up the original into several chunks because I enjoy writing that way. I find it much clearer. We could glue this all back together (still in e-prime) but I would not recommend it as we lose clarity by trying to save words:

Sometimes, writers turn the verb of an action into a noun by tagging on a suffix such as "tion", and then use that noun as the subject of a passive sentence, yielding more complex editing problems.

Warm regards,

Andy