A passive construction turns a sentence around so the thing acted upon comes first: "the report was submitted late." Writers and editors have argued about when this is a fault and when it is a fair choice for the best part of a century, and the argument is worth knowing before you take a side on it.

The case against it

George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" set the terms most style guides still repeat: the passive lets a writer avoid saying who did what, and prose loaded with passive constructions reads as evasive or bureaucratic. "Mistakes were made" names no one, and that is the complaint. Style guides since have added a second charge, that the passive usually needs more words than the active version of the same sentence, because it needs a form of "to be" and often a "by" phrase the active sentence does not.

The rebuttal

Linguists who have studied the passive at scale, among them Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style, point out that Orwell's own essay uses the passive more than once, and that scientific, legal and administrative writing has used it for centuries for reasons that have nothing to do with evasion. "The samples were tested at three temperatures" is not hiding a scientist. It is saying, correctly, that the test conditions matter more than the tester did. Studies of published English find the passive doing useful work throughout formal writing.

Where this leaves the rule

The site's position is this. Use the passive when the actor is unknown, when the actor matters less than what happened to them, or when end-focus, putting the most important word at the end of the sentence where a reader's attention naturally lands, calls for it. See Sentences: Length, Rhythm and One Idea Each for more on how that works. Outside those three cases, the active version is usually shorter and clearer about who did what, so it is the better default, in line with the approach set out in Plain English Without Dumbing Down. The sections below work through each of the three cases with a worked example, so you can see the difference between a passive doing a job and one only doing a disappearing act.

Three sentences below, each built the same way, doing three different jobs. The construction is identical: the thing being acted on comes first, and the verb changes shape to fit. What changes is what the shape is used for, and that is what decides whether it belongs in the sentence.

The passive that hides responsibility

A report might say: "Mistakes were made in the handling of the account, and the client was not informed for several weeks." Both clauses have an actor missing, and in each case someone specific did something specific: someone mishandled the account, someone chose not to tell the client. The passive here is not describing an unknown actor, it is removing a known one from view. Rewritten with the actor restored, the sentence reads: "The account team mishandled the account, and did not tell the client for several weeks." That version is harder to write because it names who is responsible, which is exactly why the passive gets reached for in reports and incident write-ups. The test is simple: if you can supply the missing actor in five seconds, the passive is doing concealment.

The passive that correctly de-emphasises the actor

Compare that with: "The server was restarted at 2am, and normal service resumed by 2.15." Here the actor genuinely does not matter to the reader of the incident log. Whether it was the on-call engineer, a scheduled script or someone woken up specially, the fact the reader needs is that the server went down and came back. Naming the actor would add a word without adding information, which is the opposite problem to the one above: this passive is not hiding anything, because there is nothing there worth showing.

The passive that places the important word at the end

The third case turns on a habit English readers have without realising it: they give more weight to whatever sits at the end of a sentence (end-focus, the term for this). Take a paragraph already discussing a customer complaint. "The complaint was upheld by the ombudsman" keeps the already-known subject, the complaint, up front, and saves the newsworthy fact, who upheld it, for the position where readers pay most attention. The active version, "The ombudsman upheld the complaint," is not wrong, but it spends the sentence's strongest position on "the complaint", which the reader already knew about two sentences ago. More on how sentence position carries weight is in the guide on sentence rhythm.

None of this makes the passive good or bad on its own. It makes it a tool with three uses and one misuse, and the only way to tell which one is in front of you is to ask whether the missing actor is unknown, irrelevant, or simply inconvenient to name.