Word Order and Reclaiming Passive Voice

My, my. How teachers lie.

So far, the biggest impact this series has had on my writing is flow, a concept that has always been a bit nebulous to me but is actually simple. Sentences flow one to the other when the focus of the end of the first sentence is the focus of the beginning of the next.

In an early draft of this essay, I wrote: …because I want to experiment with the elements we discuss in these essays. In today’s essay, we’ll focus on word order… It’s my insecurity over flow that had me linking essay to essay. The subject of the final phrase was the elements with which I want to experiment. Word order is one of those elements, and I can tie those ideas together without being so obvious about it.

I don’t mean to say that connecting word to word is bad, but because I was newly focusing on flow, I was overusing the technique. I think it can work well, as in this opening paragraph from a new story I’m working on:

The original pages are splattered with the author’s blood, the journal having fallen from his grasp, arterial spray bleeding–bright blood bleeding–between the letters and the fibers of each page, hiding forever the letters he’d written–his forever declarations of love–to be delivered, presumably, upon her death. Death came, instead, for Preston Hughes, long-time producer and would-be villain. Left for me to find. First the journal. Then the man. A man I thought I knew.

In my first pass at the paragraph, it ended a little differently.

“Then the man. Somehow, I thought I knew him.”

Because I’m thinking about flow, I saw how the connection between the two lines was as far apart as possible. I switched the word order to have a fragment that began with “man” instead of a sentence that ended with “him.”

Word order matters, and flow is one reason why.

It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway keeps the focus on the sail by putting it at the beginning of the second sentence, but in doing so, he’s used the passive voice. Horrors! Never use the passive voice. Right?

When I was child, I asked how you could divide a number by a bigger number, and my teacher lied to me. She said you can’t divide 2 by 4, which is nonsense, but I didn’t yet have the knowledge to make sense of a better answer. Fractions and decimals would come another year. If we never advanced in elementary school, we would have held on to the truth handed down to us: you can’t divide a small number by a larger number. This rule absolute would be the subject of many YouTube channels, and blossoming mathematicians everywhere would be nipped in the proverbial bud.

That’s the story of passive voice. Its construction flavors every writer’s early attempts, and writing 101 urges the would-be novelist to always use the active voice. What of writing 201, 301, and 401? As we progress with our fiction, we learn the passive voice has its purpose.

Passive voice has as its topic the object an action was done to. The doer of the action might only be implied, which is why the phrase, by zombies, can identify the passive voice: The sail was patched with flour sacks by zombies.

Your English teacher might well have crossed through the line and insisted you change the voice:

…he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The old man had patched the sail with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

Is that an improvement? Your English teacher might have thought so, but the flow is gone.

A sentence’s topic is the vantage point from which the reader understands the rest of your sentence. When sentences flow, there’s no big leap from where the last one ends to the beginning of the new one from which the reader spies the focal point—the rest of the sentence.

In Hemingway’s sentence, the sail is the topic. We look from the topic to the focal point: patched with flour sacks, and Hemingway takes this compound sentence, makes the sail the topic of the second clause as well, and makes that clause active—

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

—and ends with that vivid final focus.

We need not fly the flag of permanent defeat when it comes to maturing our prose style. Advanced style techniques are hard to come by, unlike the proliferation of advice for beginners, but the information exists.

Subscribe and don’t miss an entry in my prose-style series. Like, comment, and share to help me reach a broader audience. If you’re reading this on email, interactions will take you to the Literary Salon website, as they can’t be completed within the email, but that’s not such a scary thing. You might even find others in the comments who share your love of literature and language.

— Thaddeus Thomas

See all the essays in the series. Prose Style: Table of Contents.