Why Teaching Passive Voice Matters in High School ELA
High school English teachers can all agree that our students struggle to recognize passive voice, don’t know when to use it and when it’s a bad choice, and don’t know how to revise from passive to active. We find ourselves marking “PV” for “passive voice” on papers over and over again. Our students are striving to sound academic, but they end up sounding pompous, sprinkling immature, confusing, and wordy passive constructions throughout their work.
Our students are never going to grasp passive voice if we just mark it on their papers and hand them back. They need lessons that will help them improve their language control and give them a grasp of the style and grammar issues passive voice presents. This topic will keep coming up in their writing lives, and they’ll need to master it if they want to write well for college, perform on standardized tests, and impress future employers
After decades of teacher education colleges telling us to teach grammar “in context” (mostly through mini-lessons during writing workshops), the results speak for themselves, and they aren’t good. Too many of our students are graduating high school unable to identify passive constructions and failing to make strategic voice & style choices. When our students use passive voice without understanding it, their writing suffers from vague, wordy constructions that hide agency, create confusion, and weaken their arguments.
What Is Passive Voice and Why Do Students Need to Master It?
Passive voice occurs when the subject of a sentence receives the action rather than performs it.
Active voice example: The student submitted the essay.
Passive voice example: The essay was submitted by the student.
Nobody likes teaching grammar these days, but the students NEED grammar instruction to solve problems with passive voice. Why? Understanding passive voice requires students to identify:
- Forms of “to be” plus past participles
- How subjects and objects function differently in active versus passive constructions
- Who is doing what in a sentence (agency and actors)
Although passive voice isn’t grammatically incorrect, we must teach grammar so students can identify it and eliminate it when needed. We then must teach students that it’s a style/voice choice, meaning that we use passive or active voice strategically. Each option, active or passive, can be chosen with a goal in mind: are we controlling emphasis, clarity, or accountability? The problem emerges when students overuse passive constructions or deploy them inappropriately, creating evasive, wordy, or unclear prose.
How Passive Voice Appears on the SAT and ACT
Both the SAT Writing and Language Test and the ACT English section regularly test passive voice concepts. Understanding how these standardized tests approach passive voice is important if teachers wish to prepare students for these exams!
SAT Passive Voice Questions
The SAT covers passive voice in several ways:
- Wordiness and conciseness: Questions require students to identify when passive constructions add unnecessary words without a rhetorical benefit.
- Clarity: Students must recognize when passive voice obscures meaning or makes sentences harder to understand.
- Consistency: Some questions test whether passive or active voice better matches the surrounding sentences (to maintain stylistic cohesion).
The SAT strongly favors clear, concise active voice, though it does occasionally require passive constructions for consistency or for specific rhetorical purposes (to sound objective, to match with surrounding language, to deal with an unknown or unimportant do-er).
ACT Passive Voice Questions
The ACT English section tests similar concepts:
- Inappropriate shifts in voice: Students solve problems when switching between active and passive creates a feeling of inconsistency.
- Wordiness: Students solve unnecessarily complex passive constructions that can be simplified into less wordy sentences.
- Emphasis and clarity: Students choose between active and passive based on what element deserves emphasis (the “do-er” or the receiver of the action).
The ACT rewards students who can identify awkward passive constructions and select clearer, active alternatives.
Students who master passive voice recognition and revision gain significant advantages on the ACT and SAT! My Passive Voice bell ringers, worksheets, and slides teach key SAT & ACT passive voice concepts in 3 weeks of mini-lessons!
What to Teach When Teaching Passive Voice
A comprehensive passive voice unit for students in grades 9-12 should ensure students can…
1. Recognize Passive Voice Constructions
Students must identify passive voice by locating forms of “to be” plus past participles. They should understand how subjects, objects, and agents (“doers” and “receivers”) function differently in passive versus active sentences.
2. Understand Rhetorical Purpose
Teach students when passive voice serves specific purposes:
- Scientific writing: Lab reports and research papers use passive voice to emphasize procedures and results (emphasizing those things rather than the specific scientists or researchers involved).
- Objective documentation: Legal and technical writing employs passive constructions to try to create an impartial/non-biased tone.
- Unknown or irrelevant actors: When who performed an action doesn’t matter or isn’t known, passive voice can be okay or preferable to active voice.
- Diplomatic communication: Passive voice can soften criticism or avoid direct blame, as with sentences like, “Mistakes have been made.”
We want students to recognize when they SHOULD use passive voice, but also when using passive voice weakens writing by hiding accountability, adding unnecessary words, or creating unclear sentences. Don’t shy away from teaching them about when it may be called for or appropriate. You can teach them when and why it’s frowned upon AND when it may be necessary!
3. Convert Between Active and Passive Voice
Students need hands-on practice transforming sentences from passive to active and vice versa. This skill allows them to demonstrate control over sentence structure and emphasis while building a deeper understanding of how voice affects meaning.
Just as you’ve seen how powerful sentence combining exercises can be for improving student writing, you’ll see how useful revision/transformation exercises are when it comes to choosing between active and passive voice & revising with purpose.
4. Make Strategic Voice Choices
Beyond recognition, students must determine whether active or passive voice better serves their specific purpose, audience, and context. This requires analyzing rhetorical situations and making intentional decisions rather than defaulting to one voice or choosing randomly!
Note that students will be tempted to ALWAYS choose active voice after you review passive voice topics with them (This is, after all, an 8th-grade topic.) We want to emphasize choosing which option is best for the situation rather than leave them thinking “passive bad” for the rest of their lives!
5. Develop Strong Editing Skills
Students should practice revising their own writing, identifying inappropriate passive constructions, using passive voice when needed, and strengthening their sentences through strategic voice choices. This practice helps them build self-editing habits to improve ALL of their writing. Rather than changing passive constructions every time their grammar checker, AI helper, or Grammarly warns them, they will then be able to make informed choices themselves.
6. Build Critical Reading Skills
You may also want to teach students to recognize when passive voice appears in media, politics, or professional contexts to conceal agency or avoid responsibility. For example, phrases like “mistakes were made” exemplify how passive voice can be deliberately evasive.
How to Teach Passive Voice: Direct Instruction vs. Contextual Learning
In the old days, we used direct instruction to teach grammar. Now, most teachers either don’t teach grammar at all, or they try to teach it “in context” (as a response to student errors). For decades, it seemed everyone was talking about old-school grammar lessons as though they were something backwards, even horrific… “Not the dreaded “skill and drill” teaching approach! We’d never do that!!” I’m sorry, everyone, but has this attitude and shift in teaching helped or hurt students?? It hurt them, right? Their skills are worse now, right? So let’s change it! Please?
Why Direct Instruction Works for Teaching Passive Voice
Structured, systematic passive voice instruction provides students with…
- Clear explanations of how passive constructions function grammatically
- Logically sequenced lessons that build from recognition to analysis to strategic application
- Targeted practice that reinforces concepts through repetition
- Dedicated time ensuring students genuinely master the concept (rather than encountering it briefly during writing units in one-time mini lessons or “grammar in context” (which typically means brief & fleeting reviews or lessons that have no ongoing practice or assessment associated with them)
Fleeting mini-lessons or “targeted worksheets” triggered by a teacher’s impression of student writing issues CANNOT provide the comprehensive understanding of a topic (like passive voice) that our students need. Mastering passive voice vs. active voice actually REQUIRES explicit teaching, guided practice, and multiple opportunities to apply concepts in various contexts. We must teach LESSONS within a UNIT if we want to truly TEACH passive vs. active voice!!
An Effective Passive Voice Unit Structure
A well-designed passive voice unit for high school students should include…
- Foundational lessons on identifying passive constructions
- Analysis activities examining when passive voice serves a rhetorical purpose and when active voice is more rhetorically effective
- Revision exercises improving weak passive constructions and transforming passive sentences into active sentences
- Assessment opportunities measuring student mastery through frequent formative checks and summative quizzes
Teaching Passive Voice in Mixed-Ability Classrooms
High school students arrive in our classrooms with vastly different grammar backgrounds. Some received good, strong, systematic instruction in middle school; many did not. Some studied passive voice previously but need review; others will encounter the concept for the first time in your classroom, even though it is an 8th-grade topic.
To reach students of all ability and readiness levels, our high school passive voice lessons must:
- Begin with foundational passive vs. active voice recognition skills that work for both introduction and review. Start with grammar and identification.
- Build toward rhetorical analysis and strategic revision. Work on when to use (and not use) passive voice (and why) later on in the unit, and then add revision exercises.
- Use age-appropriate materials that engage modern teens rather than outdated content (often sourced from old textbooks or decades-old online resources) or K-8-level content aimed at younger children (especially middle-school/grade 8 materials).
- Provide scaffolded support allowing all learners to access increasingly complex concepts. Use frequent formative assessment, like going over or checking student practice work. Engage in error analysis where you verbally walk kids through how they reached an incorrect answer and what thinking/resources you would use to reach the correct answer.
How Passive Voice Connects to Larger ELA Concepts/Other Grammar and Writing Concepts
Teaching passive voice in a structured unit with direct instruction/focused lessons reinforces essential skills across the English Language Arts curriculum!
Sentence Structure Mastery
Understanding passive voice requires identifying subjects, verbs, objects, verb phrases, and even participles! This strengthens foundational sentence analysis skills. Basic grammar instruction like this improves ACT/SAT scores for my 11th graders every year!
Rhetorical Awareness
Passive voice instruction develops your students’ understanding of purpose, audience, and tone. We discuss when and why we may wish to use active vs. passive or passive vs. active and how those choices affect tone. Plus, students also encounter the idea, yet again, that language choices affect how readers perceive their writing!
Clarity and Precision
Learning when to avoid passive voice helps students produce direct, clear prose that shows who did what in a clear, logical, and straightforward manner. It eliminates a lot of wordy and hard-to-parse constructions that students create when TRYING to sound academic.
Academic and Professional Readiness
Students learn to navigate field-specific conventions, understanding when passive voice is preferred versus when active constructions are expected. You’ll discuss what fields, disciplines, and situations may call for passive, and which ones demand mostly active voice.
The Real-World Benefits of Mastering Passive Voice
College Writing Success
We’ve all read enough student essays to know that our students’ overuse of passive voice often makes their writing feel evasive, pompous, awkward, and immature. Sentences like “It can be argued that this novel is about the current political climate” feel frustrating and juvenile when we are looking for clear, decisive prose, not wishy-washy fluff. College admissions officers and professors notice these issues, too! If we can help our students control their voice choices strategically in their writing, they will produce stronger application essays and be stronger writers as they enter college!
Professional Communication
In workplace writing, inappropriate passive constructions signal a lack of language control, immature writing skills, a poor grasp of stylistic and rhetorical concerns, and potential evasiveness or uncertainty. Mastering voice helps our students communicate effectively in professional contexts and make a good impression on their future employers, colleagues, and clients!
Self-Editing Confidence
Students who understand passive voice can evaluate suggestions from grammar checkers and AI tools rather than blindly accepting them. This is crucial since passive voice isn’t “incorrect.” Grammar checkers will underline it or point it out as an issue, but students need to know that it’s a style and clarity issue that apps & software often mishandle. They CAN and SHOULD use passive voice at times, and they should ignore their Grammar checker/AI tool in some cases when it alerts them that they may want to change a passive construction. After learning more about passive voice, they can choose when to change that passive sentence and when to keep it!
Critical Media Literacy
It may seem like a passive voice unit is all about grammar, style, and writing skills; however, it ties in with some critical thinking topics, too! For example, it’ll help students recognize when politicians, corporations, or media outlets use passive voice to avoid assigning responsibility or obscure an actor/do-er!
Key Principles for Students to Understand: When to Use Passive Voice
While voice choice can seem subjective to our students, especially when they learn that using passive voice is NOT a grammatical error, they need to understand that choosing active vs. passive voice is guided by specific principles. A good passive voice unit will teach students that good writers choose which voice to use based on which is the most clear, concise, engaging, and rhetorically appropriate.
Generally, we want students to avoid passive voice when it:
- Makes a student’s writing feel weak or unconfident
- Adds unnecessary words and feels clunky/wordy
- Obscures who performed actions (without good reason)
- Creates vague or unclear sentences
We want students to use passive voice strategically when:
- The actor is unknown or irrelevant
- They want to signal objectivity in scientific or legal writing
- They want to emphasize the action’s receiver rather than the doer
- They are maintaining consistency with the surrounding text (especially on the ACT/SAT)
- It’s rhetorically appropriate (to feel more diplomatic or to soften criticism)
On standardized tests, we want the kids to remember that the SAT and ACT prioritize conciseness, clarity, and appropriate emphasis. If passive voice is wordier without justification or less clear than active voice, it’s likely the WRONG choice when we’re looking at ACT/SAT answer choices.
Adding Passive Voice to Your Grammar Curriculum
Passive voice instruction works best as part of a comprehensive grammar curriculum. Students should master parts of speech, sentence structure, verb identification, and participles before tackling passive voice! (This “Fall Grammar Curriculum” covers those bases.)
What lessons do passive voice units complement?
- Rhetorical analysis and argumentation
- Domain specific conventions
- Editing and revision strategies
- Critical reading of biased or evasive texts
- Control of emphasis and tone
When do I teach passive voice?
I like to teach passive voice in the Spring, when we focus on similar issues (like modifier errors, agreement issues, and maintaining one tense).
Conclusion: Why High School Students Deserve Old School Grammar Instruction
Grammar errors and weak writing can determine whether students gain college acceptance or land job opportunities. In today’s globally competitive environment, our students cannot afford to rely on guessing, going with “what sounds right” to them, or even blindly trusting AI grammar checkers.
For many decades, we’ve assumed students would absorb grammar patterns and rules through osmosis and fleeting “mini lessons” or error-response worksheets. This approach has failed. Our students deserve explicit teaching (direct instruction and focused, sustained lessons), guided practice, and multiple opportunities to master essential skills like passive voice recognition and strategic usage! We MUST return to the OG ways that WORKED for all students, including our struggling learners and those with learning gaps!
By providing structured, systematic passive voice instruction with clear explanations, relevant examples, meaningful practice, and genuine mastery opportunities, teachers give students the language confidence and skill set they need for academic and professional success. And, yes, that means doing some SKILL AND DRILL with our high schoolers. Don’t apologize for it. Don’t let methods and ideas that are FAILING our students shame YOU out of doing what’s right. TEACH your students these essential grammar skills!
SUMMARY: Teaching Passive Voice in High School: Effective passive voice instruction combines direct teaching with logically sequenced lessons and targeted practice. High school students in grades 9-12 benefit from age-appropriate materials, comprehensive workbooks, visual aids, and multiple assessment opportunities that address the needs of struggling, on-level, and advanced learners.
What are your views on teaching grammar, usage, and mechanics? Drop a comment below!
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About the Author: Carly Lamp has taught English 11/English III (American Lit) for 13 years & AP Literature for 10 years. She creates thorough, thoughtful, and rigorous materials, units, and resources for high school English teachers through both her blog and her TPT store (both named English with Mrs. Lamp). She believes great teaching shouldn’t require burning yourself out!
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