Business English and the passive voice
This guide will not cover the considerable structural and
semantic complications of the passive voice in English. For
that, you are referred to the general guide to the passive voice in
the in-service training section, linked below.
Here, we are concerned with how the passive is used in Business
English contexts.
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Five reasons |
We do, however, need to remind ourselves of the five main reasons
for using the passive voice in English and then to see which ones
fit most easily with the use of English in a business context.
We also need to look briefly at the concepts that underlie these
five uses.
The five are:
- Because we are less interested in the agent and more concerned
with the patient. For example, in:
The invoice was issued
We are not concerned with the agent (probably, we know it's someone in the finance department). We are concerned with what happened to the invoice (the patient, not the agent). - Because it's obvious what the subject is so unnecessary to state
it. For example, in:
The CEO must be consulted
we are aware that it is people in the company who do the consulting. - Because we don't know what the subject is. For example, in:
Security has been breached
we don't know who breached security. - Because, stylistically or for social reasons, we are concerned
not to identify the agent. For example, in:
A mistake has been identified
we do not want to lay blame at anyone's door (certainly not our own) so we omit the agent altogether. - Because we want to emphasise the agent. This is often a
spoken form because we need to stress the agent when we speak.
For example:
The invoice was issued by the Finance Department
emphasises the fact that it is the Finance Department to whom you should refer if there is a problem.
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Markedness |
Underlying all the reasons above is the concept of markedness. The passive is, in English and most other languages, marked in some way to lend weight to an item. For example, we can choose to say:
- The boss has arranged a meeting for this afternoon
or we can say: - A meeting has been arranged for this afternoon
but we are less likely to say: - A meeting has been arranged for this afternoon by the boss
In sentence 1, The boss is the marked item because the
phrase occupies the theme position in the sentence and implies that
the boss is the main player. The point of departure for what
follows is the boss' role and actions.
In sentence 2, it is The meeting which occupies the topical theme
slot and that is the point of departure for what follows (the
rheme).
Sentence 3, perversely, also emphasises the role of the boss,
because English tends to place important items towards the end of
clauses and the use of the agent in the passive structure emphasises
who called the meeting, not the meeting itself.
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Task: To make this even clearer to learners (and you), decide which of the following three clauses is like to come next in the three cases above:
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| Click here when you have an answer. | |
You should have:
Sentence 1. → c.
The boss has arranged a meeting for this afternoon so our meeting will have to wait.
Because The boss is in the
theme position of the active-voice sentence and this afternoon
forms part of the rheme, it is natural to continue to use that
rheme to explain why our meeting will be delayed and to make it
clear why this afternoon is important.
Sentence 2. → a.
A meeting has been arranged for this afternoon and it'll be at 3 in the conference room.
Because A meeting is in the theme,
marked position, and, again, this afternoon is part of the rheme,
it is logical to add the information about the time and place.
Sentence 3. → b.
A meeting has been arranged for this afternoon by the
boss and he expects everyone to be there.
Because we have included the agent in the
by-phrase at the end of the rheme, marking it for emphasis, the theme of the
following clause, he, continues on from there, forming the
next theme.
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Selecting passive constructions in Business English |
This is not the place to explain or suggest how best to
approach teaching the structural nuts and bolts of forming passive
clauses. On a Business English course, most participants will
know how to do that. What they need help with is identifying
when and why the passive should be used.
Most business-oriented communication is quite formal and it is in
formal writing and speaking that passive constructions are most
common.
Here are three of the reasons why we select the forms and the sorts
of forms we will select:
- Impersonal tone
- Compare:
The delivery schedule will be with you by Thursday of next week
with
I'll get the delivery schedule to you by Thursday of next week
In the first sentence, the writer / speaker has selected the passive in order to make it clear that she takes no personal responsibility for the promise about Thursday. Keeping things impersonal.
In the second sentence, the writer / speaker has committed herself to the promise and the reader / hearer will know who to contact to complain if the promise is not kept. Making it personal.
Which form is selected is not a grammatical or even semantic issue, it is a pragmatic one to do with the relationship between the participants and the tone of the interaction.
Neither is, in other words, correct in any sense but learners need to be aware of the effect of selecting one form over another.
An intermediate statement can be formed along the lines of
We'll get the delivery schedule to you by Thursday
which commits not the individual but the organisation itself to the promise. - Emphasising the agent
- Even in the written form, the by-phrase may serve
to emphasise responsibility, and, indeed, move it from the
speaker / writer to another.
Compare, for example:
The department manager wrote the report
with
The report was written by the department manager
In the first case, the discourse may naturally be continued with
... which was presented to the board
but in the second case, a more likely continuation, which emphasises responsibility would be
... who was not aware of the potential problems.
The choice of the type of relative pronoun clause depends on the use of the passive voice. - Omitting the agent
- The passive voice is frequently seen in business-orientated
texts because of shared information between speaker and hearer
or writer and reader so the use of the agent or the making of an
active-voice sentence is unconventional and may sound strange.
For example:
Our factory in Strasburg made the packaging
The receptionists will welcome the clients on arrival
The PA has made the appointments for tomorrow
She has reserved a parking space for you
all mark the subject, because it is in the theme position and make it appear more important than the object whereas:
The packaging was made in Strasburg
The clients will be welcomed on arrival
The appointments have been made for tomorrow
A parking space has been reserved for you
are more both more likely and more natural because the agent is either known, unknown or of no importance.
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The passive infinitive |
Because the direct use of modal auxiliary verbs, especially
those used deontically (to express degrees of obligation), is
unusual in formal language or Business English settings, passive
infinitives are commonly used. So for example, instead of:
You must agree the terms of the contract
we will often prefer
The terms of the contract must be agreed
because it is far less direct and discourteous.
Additionally, instead of:
You should have let me know about the meeting
we would normally prefer
I should have been told about the meeting
which saves the face of the hearer by neatly omitting the
guilty party.
By the same token:
The Finance Department ought to have issued
the invoices immediately
is probably better put as:
The invoices should have been issued
immediately
because everyone knows who issues invoices and there is no need
to single out the guilty party.
Passive infinitives are, however, not easy to handle and learners
require a good deal of exposure and practice.
There are three main sorts:
- Present passive infinitives are formed by using the modal
auxiliary verb and the infinitive of be plus the past
participle of the main verb. Like this:
The meeting can be held on Thursday
The order should be processed soon
The work may not be completed in time
etc. - Perfect passive infinitives are formed with have been
plus the past participle and occur mostly with modal auxiliary
verbs as a commentary on the past as in, e.g.:
That should not have been promised
The package may have gone astray
The reports needn't have been so long
The work could have been completed much earlier
An important conceptual point is that the form looks very similar to the present perfect tense but does not necessarily carry the sense of present relevance. The perfect passive infinitive is, therefore, a past tense, not a present perfect tense. - Double passives
Passive infinitives often co-occur with other passive constructions, forming double passives such as:
The order is expected to be filled by the end of the week
Some find such constructions clumsy at best, plain wrong at worst.
Although the passive infinitive is frequently used with modal
auxiliary verbs that is not solely the case because the form also
occurs with other verbs as in:
The manager asked to be kept informed of progress
The customer has requested to be told when the order is
dispatched
The director expected it to have been done
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Dynamic and stative passives and participle adjectives |
In some languages, such as German, many other Germanic
languages, Spanish and Italian, there is a distinction between a
dynamic passive and a stative passive and that is signalled by the
choice of auxiliary verb. English can make this distinction by
the use of the verb get instead of the more usual be
to form the passive as in, for example:
The production schedule was disturbed
and
The production schedule got disturbed
However, in English, the use of get to form a passive
is considered informal at best (some disparage it altogether as
being slang, which it is not) and that is not a characteristic
generally parallelled in other languages. The use of get
to form a passive is, therefore, unusual in Business English and
somewhat jarring when it is used in formal contexts.
Because English can use the verb be to signal both a
dynamic and a stative passive, it is usually the preferred choice.
In English, for example:
The email was issued by the Human Resources
manager
can refer to both the action of issuing the email and the state
of the email concerning its source where other languages might
distinguish these aspects.
If the distinction does need to be made, the safe choice in English
is to rephrase the clause in the active voice, where this is
possible.
It is, unfortunately not always possible to use an active-voice
construction when the agent is unknown or obvious so, for example:
The staff was upset
could mean that the staff was in a state of being upset or that
something in particular upset them. Rephrasing in the active
voice is not possible unless the agent is known so we might have:
The changes upset the staff
The manager upset the staff
The new working practices upset the staff
and so on but all of these, as we have seen, put the agent in
the theme position and mark it for importance.
The good news is that English does not distinguish the form of a
participle used as an adjective and the participle forming part of
an agentless passive construction so, for example, in:
It is important to ensure that the customer
is not inconvenienced
the word inconvenienced can be seen as an adjective to
describe the customer or as part of a passive construction and for
communicative purposes, the distinction does not matter. And
in:
The staff was upset
the word upset is clearly adjectival in nature because
it can be modified conventionally as in
The staff was extremely upset
and the active use is rare or disallowed:
*The manager extremely upset the staff
The less good news is that English syntax differs when a verb
form is used adjectivally.
The issue concerns the use of complementation by a that-clause or a by- phrase. The former is confined to
adjectival uses and the latter to verbal uses.
So, for example:
The client was disappointed that the order didn't arrive on
time
is an adjectival use of disappointed and
*The client was disappointed by the order did not arrive on
time
is not allowed because the by-phrase is a signal of
verbal use and needs a noun-phrase complement. We need to
rephrase that as:
The client was disappointed by the late
arrival of the order
Learners whose first languages distinguish the form of adjectives from the forms of verbs in passive constructions are prone to errors of this sort.
| Links | |
| voice | for a general and more elementary guide to voice |
| the passive | for the in-service guide to the area which includes consideration of teaching approaches and much else |