The Middle Voice

Most writers have heard of the active voice and the passive voice.

But have you heard of the middle voice?

I hadn’t until a couple of weeks ago, when my pastor mentioned it in his sermon. It was just a throwaway line, about how he’s currently studying Biblical Greek and not looking forward to next semester when they will study middle voice.

So what the middle voice?

We can think of voice in the same way as tense or point of view:

All writing has tense, whether past or present or future.

All writing has a point of view, whether first or second or third or omniscient (which some people consider an extension of third, but that’s a different subject).

Equally, all writing has voice, usually active or passive.

Here’s a refresher.

First, we need a quick reminder of a typical sentence structure. In English, the typical sentence structure is:

Subject – Verb – Object

The subject is the star of the show. The verb is the action – the “doing word”. And the object is what the subject is acting upon.

Here’s an example:

Jane threw the ball.

Jane is the subject, the noun (person) doing the action.

Threw is the verb, the description of the action.

The object is the ball, which is being acted upon.

That sentence is in active voice, because the subject (Jane) is performing the action (throwing).

Writers are encouraged to use active voice when writing, especially in fiction.

Passive voice changes the sentence structure. For example:

The ball was thrown by Jane.

The sentence describes the same action, but Jane is no longer the subject of the sentence. Instead, based on a Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure, the ball is the subject.

And that’s a problem, because the ball is an inanimate object. It can’t act by itself. It can be thrown by a person or by a machine. It can be moved by the wind or by gravity. It can be carried by a dog or a person or in a vehicle. But it’s passive. It can’t move without help.

This is why writing teachers suggest authors don’t use the word “was”: because “was” often indicates passive voice (but not always, so you don’t have to delete all the instances of “was” from your manuscript. Just make sure none of them are hiding unintentional examples of passive voice).

Writers are told to avid passive voice, because it adds a layer of distance between the writer and the reader.

I have to admit that I sometimes use passive voice when writing editorial letters, back when I was a freelance fiction editor. Active voice sometimes felt like I was telling the author off for dong something wrong. Passive voice felt like I was describing a feature of good writing to the author without accusing them of doing the opposite.

And there are times when passive voice is correct, because it doesn’t matter who took the action – the point is the action was taken, and there was an end result. For example:

Coffee powder and hot water were combined to make coffee.

I have my coffee. It doesn’t matter who made it.

Middle Voice

So what is middle voice? It’s a sentence with an action and an object but no subject:

The painting was stolen.

Merriam-Websters says middle voice

“asserts that a person or thing both performs and is affected by the action represented.”

I can think of several possible reasons for using the middle voice. Perhaps the writer doesn’t know the identity of the subject (i.e. who stole the painting).

Perhaps the writer wants to hide the identity of the thief (which could turn the writer into an unreliable narrator).

Perhaps the writer wants to appear neutral. Perhaps they suspect who stole the painting, but don’t want to disclose that fact right now e.g. a journalist wanting or needing to appear neutral, or if they are a witness in a court case.

In addition, there are some sentences which are grammatically correct but which don’t have a subject and an object. For example:

The horse died.

Is the horse the subject or the object? Is it both? It doesn’t matter: the horse is dead, and the implication is that it died of natural causes. Otherwise, we’d say:

The horse died of a heart attack.

Or:

Someone killed the horse (with “someone” being an unidentified subject).

The horse was poisoned (with the action then implying the existence of an unidentified subject who performed the action).

And that is the middle voice – those sentences that are grammatically correct, yet neither active nor passive. I suspect I’ve often used middle voice in my writing without knowing it.

What about you? Have you ever deliberately used middle voice? Will you use it, now you know what it is?