Z is for Zombies

Paula’s not talking about the living dead, but about using the passive tense!

I invariably grit my teeth when I see any writing advice about not using the word ‘was’. It appears regularly in lists of ‘words to delete from your writing’.

In some cases, I would agree, particularly when ‘was’ is used with an adjective. ‘He was happy’ or ‘She was upset’ are examples of telling, and it is far better to delete ‘was’ (plus the adjective) and show the emotions in a far more effective way.

However, some style ‘pundits’ try to tell us that the use of the word ‘was’ with a verb indicates passive tense, and this is where I disagree. For example, ‘She was sitting by the window when he entered the cafe’ is not passive. In this example, ‘was’ is part of the past continuous tense, indicating an ongoing action or state i.e. she was already sitting there when he entered the cafe. If we change the sentence to omit the word ‘was’, the meaning changes. ‘She sat by the window when he entered the cafe’ would give the impression that she sat by the window at the same time as he entered the café.

So where do the zombies come into all this? Recently I read that if you can insert by zombies after a verb, and your sentence still makes sense (in a way!), you are using the passive mode.

So, for example, “He was told (by zombies) to go immediately to the police station’ or ‘His car was hit (by zombies) at the road junction’ are both passive sentences, which could easily be converted into active mode e.g. His wife told him to go immediately to the police station’ or ‘A large van hit his car at the road junction.’

Grammatically speaking, the passive mode consists of the word ‘was’ followed by the past participle of a verb. However, although the general advice is to avoid passive verbs, there are times when they cannot be avoided. Sometimes this is when the person(s) performing the action is/are unknown e.g. ‘The building was demolished in the 1970s.’ Yes, you can insert by zombies in this sentence, and, assuming you actually know who demolished it, you could change it to active tense, e.g. ‘The local council (or the owners, or whoever) decided to demolish the building in the 1970s’ – but in this case, you could be introducing extra information that is irrelevant to your story, so this is an occasion when I think the passive tense is acceptable.

Therefore, by all means use the by zombies trick to indicate passive tense in your work, but, as with all these so-called ‘rules’, use your own discretion!