When is passive voice acceptable?
I am working on a fiction novel and have had difficulties with the passive voice. I feel that in this case the sentence is stronger when the passive voice is used. "Born in a land without justice, sodden with the blood and tears of earlier generations, he lived........"
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1 answer
But it's not passive voice, not really. You've just elided the subject because it's the subject of multiple clauses.
Let's say your original sentence is:
Born in a land without justice, sodden with the blood and tears of earlier generations, he lived a typical brutal peasant's life.
If you invert the clauses and spell them out, you have:
He lived a typical brutal peasant's life. He was born in a land without justice. The land was sodden with the blood and tears of earlier generations.
What you do have is an ambiguously dangling modifier — you have to read carefully to make sure you see that sodden with the blood and tears of earlier generations is modifying "a land" and not "him."
Passive voice has no actor, no subject. Mistakes were made.
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