By Diego Alegría

How can we teach writing beyond questions around grammar, but through its very own instruments and problems? This question has guided the way I approach my writing center sessions. Here, I hope to trace a tentative answer by describing and analyzing a mentorship session that focused on the use of passive voice.  In this session, Monica (my mentee) and I not only worked on the grammatical construction of passive voice, but also its implications in terms of meaning (the change of perspective), discourse (disciplinary differences across fields), and language structure (Spanish’s tendency toward passive verbs compared to English’s use of active voice).

The mentorship session

Throughout the 2023 Spring Term, Monica and I have been working together as part of a mentorship at the Writing Center. At UW-Madison, writing mentorships consist of regular meetings with the same instructor (usually every week or every other week) throughout the semester. During our sessions, we have been discussing her article manuscript on how consumers in the U.S. interact with and dispose of bioplastics. We both come from different disciplines: Monica is an environmental engineer; I am a literary scholar. But we share similar linguistic backgrounds: Spanish is our mother tongue, and English, our second language. The appointment was memorable, but, at that time, we were not aware of its underlying implications.

As part of a class activity, a team of undergraduate students helped Monica (their instructor) to sort plastic-looking cups. In the method section, Monica wrote the following sentence: “The instructors sorted the plastic-looking cups to assess polymer type.” In her marginal comments on this sentence, Andrea (Monica’s advisor) formulated the following questions: “Who is doing the actual sorting here? Or does it matter? Should we just be saying that things were sorted by a team?” Of course, both Monica and her advisor acknowledged the support of her students, as indicated in my mentee’s footnote. The rationale behind Andrea’s comment relied on how the manuscript was being framed: “Do you want to focus on the framing as a class activity? Or do you want to frame it as an experiment, with the class activity in the background?” In the mentorship session, Monica asked me about how to address this potential area for improvement. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out the way to approach her advisor’s comment, but then I suddenly discovered that Andrea already provided a possible answer by means of the very grammatical structure of one of her questions.

What is passive voice?

Before I analyze the syntactic patterns in Monica’s sentence in her manuscript and Andrea’s first marginal comment, let’s concentrate on the notion of “voice.” This concept can be a fruitful topic for writing center instruction: it shows how the way we arrange words changes the way we perceive an action. As pointed out by David Crystal, “voice” is a “category used in the grammatical description of sentence or clause structure, primarily with reference to verbs, to express the way sentences may alter the relationship between the subject and object of a verb” (515). In this light, a verb can be active or passive. When it is ‘active,’ the subject of the verb does an action. For instance, in the sentence “Anna is writing an essay,” the subject is “Anna,” the verb phrase, “is writing,” and the object, “an essay”:

Anna [subject] + is writing [verb phrase] + an essay [object]

 Meanwhile, when a verb is ‘passive,’ the subject does not do, but undergoes the action. For example, in the sentence “An essay is being written by Anna,” the subject is “An essay,” the verb phrase, “is being written,” and the complement, “by Anna”:

An essay [subject] + is being written [verb phrase] + by Anna [complement]

As we can see, both sentences are arranged in a distinct way—their grammatical subjects are different—, but these syntactic structures share the same semantic relation: both sentences express that Anna is doing an action (writing), and that the essay is underdoing this action.

In this definition of “voice,” there are two key elements I want to stress. On the one hand, although this notion primarily refers to verbs, it reveals how this part of speech relates to other syntactic functions (subject and object). On the other hand, this category is not only grammatical, but also semantic: even though the factual content between both sentences does not change, we experience a shift in terms of the perspective around the action. I emphasize both elements since they demonstrate in an instrumental way how the teaching of grammar does not exclusively tackle formal procedures, but, on the contrary, reveals how syntax interacts and intersects with other variables, such as meaning, context, and audience.

What can we do with passive voice?

Let’s return to Monica’s sentence in the manuscript and Andrea’s first marginal comment. My mentee used the active voice: “The instructors sorted the plastic-looking cups to assess polymer type.” Here, in terms of grammar, the subject is “the instructors,” the verb, “sorted,” and the object, “the plastic-looking cups”:

The instructors [subject] + sorted [verb] + the plastic-looking cups [object]

Although her advisor focused on the possible confusion around the reference of the agent—“Who is doing the actual sorting here?”—, Andrea believes that this fact might not be relevant for the purposes of the article. Her third question employs passive voice in the subordinate clause: “Should we just be saying that things were sorted by a team?” (my emphasis). Here, in terms of grammar, the subject is “things,” the verb phrase “were sorted,” and the complement, “by a team”:

things [subject] + were sorted [verb phrase] + by a team [complement]

In other words, Monica’s advisor was providing an answer by means of her very own question: the use of passive voice would shed light on the patient (“the plastic-looking cups”) rather than the agent (“the instructors”) of the action. This writing lesson might be too local compared to other global issues: it does not tackle the invention of arguments or the organization of the text, but rather problems at the level of the sentence. However, this phenomenon allowed Monica and I to discuss the employment of passive voice in other disciplinary and linguistic contexts beyond the sentence.

As writing center tutors, we generally suggest the transformation of passive voice into active or transitive structures. However, it is important to remember that the frequency of passive voice varies across time and space; for instance, “the long-term trend towards declining use of passives is more advanced” in American English than in British English (Hundt, Röthlisberger & Seoane 2). This variation is even more pronounced across sub-disciplines: natural sciences and technology prefer active constructions compared to humanities and social sciences (Hundt, Röthlisberger & Seoane 2).

What these two aspects reveal to us is the possibility of addressing linguistic and disciplinary variation against normative constructions that have been naturalized in academic writing. What I mean by this is that, as writing center tutors, we do not prescribe “correct” uses—active voice as the “best,” or “most accurate” syntactic pattern—but rather show linguistic variation across distinct contexts. The problem of passive voice gave Monica and I the opportunity to think critically not only on those naturalized syntactic forms, but also on the internal rules that shape the stylistic preferences of particular disciplines, and sub-fields. In other words, the question around grammatical form led to a discussion on the very contours that define distinct discursive domains, such as environmental engineering in the U.S.

Moreover, in my conversation with Monica, the relationship between naturalized patterns and disciplinary protocols led us to critically compare the use of passive voice in English and Spanish, and how our mother tongue has determined the way we employ this syntactic structure in English academic writing. For instance, passive voice is more used in Spanish than in English, because it can be expressed in two different ways: 1) the verb “ser” or “estar” plus a participle (“Un ensayo está escrito”); and 2) the particle “se” plus the main verb (“Un ensayo se escribe”). Passive voice not only allowed us to think about variation across internal linguistic structures (active vs passive), but also across distinct language systems (English and Spanish).

Conclusion

What I tried to illustrate in this essay is how a seemingly exclusive problem around syntax can open a conversation around the different levels that intersect this phenomenon, such as semantic effects around perspective, active voice as a naturalized form, stylistic preferences across sub-disciplines, and linguistic differences across language systems. In this light, an inquiry that has motivated this pedagogical method is how we can move beyond local questions around grammar toward global questions relative to discourse, but by means of the very own problems and categories derived from syntax. Under this framework, the writing center tutor can expose the different discursive layers that shape a particular formal phenomenon in order to show how grammatical structures interact with, as well as produce the rhetorical situation.

Works Cited

Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell, 2008.

Hundt, Marianne, Melanie Röthlisberger & Elena Seoane. “Predicting Voice Alternation across Academic Englishes.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 189-222.

---