The passive voice was used, and mistakes were made

Kill the copula, and your couch-potato prose will get totally jacked.

One of the easiest ways to spruce up your prose is to look for versions of the wimpy verb “to be.”

Take that rotten sentence I just wrote: One of the easiest ways to spruce up your prose is to look for versions of the wimpy verb “to be.” It sounds awkward, with a floppy, passive tone. Let’s fix it:

If you want an easy way to spruce up your prose, look for versions of “to be” in your draft.

That reads better. In the first version, I used a copula, the weak link between the subject and predicate of a flimsy sentence. While it technically follows the rules of grammar, the word “is” can help alert you to a boring bit of prose. Hunt down every to-be, rewrite its sentence, and then read the result aloud. You’ll find movement, action, and even blessed brevity.

Not that “to be” should never be. Wallace Stevens turned “to be” on its existential head in one of poetry’s most rhetorical clauses. “Let be be the finale of seem,” he wrote in my favorite poem, The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Every dedicated writer or persuader dreams of turning words into concrete reality. 

Besides, “to be” does not always mark the passive voice, to get technical about it.

She was very brave when she chased after tornadoes. This floppy sentence nonetheless employs the active voice. But I’d still rewrite it.

He was sucked out of the movie theater by a tornado. The poor tornado only gets ending credits. The sucking happens passively.

Should you care? Maybe a little. Politicians often use the passive voice to hide blame for any screwup. George W. Bush said “Mistakes are made” when the Iraq War went badly, turning a poorly planned invasion into an act of, well, nobody. Mistakes just emerged from the fog of war.

Bill Clinton husband committed the same passive sentence when his aides got caught sharing policy secrets in front of donors. “Mistakes were made,” the President intoned. That sentence became a meme even before memes became a thing. “Mistakes were made” ruled late-night comedy for weeks.

But Ronald Reagan had used the exact same passive clause during the Iran-Contra affair: “Serious mistakes were made,” he said sadly. Oh, wait: Jimmy Carter had used “mistakes were made” back in 1974!

Not to miss an opportunity, Chris Christie piled on the passivity 40 years later when “mistakes were made” during a scandal over lane shutdowns on the George Washington Bridge. Henry Kissinger admitted the possibility that “mistakes were made” over the Vietnam War. British Prime Minister David Cameron copped to “mistakes were made” when British personnel helped torture terrorist suspects in Guantanamo. Cameron then doubled down on his passivity by continuing, “what happened at Guantanamo Bay, there were mistakes made.”

I typed “Mistakes were made shirt” into my browser and found more than a dozen tee shirts for sale. My favorite appears below and sells on eBay. You know a sentence has become a full-fledged meme when it ends up on a shirt.

The moral: Hunt down your copulas, those couch-potato evil siblings of the verb to be. And if you ever resort to the passive voice in hopes of hiding your own peccadillo (not that you would do that, not you!), then an iniquitous style mistake will most definitely have been made. By you.