Trickster wrote:
Banjooie wrote:
For instance, if you wrote "The soup was spilled all over the floor"
"The soup had spilled all over the floor." Congratulations, it's now active voice.
Isn't that just past-tense passive voice? The actor is the cause of the spilling, not the object being spilled (this is easy to miss as "spill" is often used passively, as a means of deflecting attention from the guilty party).
No. This is active voice; Banjooie is right.
There are a number of verbs that alternate in this way; the standard example in the 1970s was "
Floyd broke the vase / The vase broke"
; you can also see it with "
John melted the butter / The butter melted"
, "
Mary froze the water / The water froze"
, "
The wind opened the door / The door opened"
, and so forth. (I think, though please don't quite me on this, that it's exclusively change-of-state verbs that work this way.) But both sentences in each of these pairs is in the active voice; the passive would be "
The butter was melted / The water was frozen / The door was opened"
.
Similarly with "
The soup had spilled"
--it's past perfect, just like "
John had spilled the soup"
is, but it's active. The passive would be "
The soup had been spilled."
The point, of course, is that the passive isn't the only way to hide agency. You're right, of course, that if there's soup on the floor, and John knocked over a bowl that resulted in it being there, then John is the
agent of the action. But there are plenty of ways to express the situation that leaves out the agent but doesn't use the passive: "
There's soup on the floor"
, say, or "
The floor is awash in soup"
. Which is why a flat dictum like "
avoid the passive!"
isn't really helpful, and why I wouldn't call any use of the passive "
completely wrong"
.