Passive Voice and Blame in an Incident Report
An incident report states: "The guard was removed before the test began. The valve was not closed, and pressure was allowed to build. It was decided that the procedure would be revised." A reader concludes that no individual is responsible because no one is named. The safety lead disagrees, saying the report does assign responsibility - just not through names. The reader must decide whether the report can support a finding of individual accountability, and how to rewrite one sentence to make agency explicit without inventing facts.
1. Does the passive construction hide all agency? Explain what each clause does and does not establish.
Read the worked answer
The passives hide who, but they do not erase that someone acted.
- "The guard was removed" - a passive with a deleted agent. It establishes that a removal occurred and implies a person did it, but names no one.
- "The valve was not closed" - states a condition, not an actor. It supports a finding that a required step was missed, but not who missed it.
- "Pressure was allowed to build" - "allowed" implies forbearance by someone; it is closer to assigning responsibility than the others, but still unnamed.
- "It was decided" - an impersonal construction; it asserts a decision without identifying the decider.
So the safety lead is partly right: the report establishes that omissions occurred, which can support accountability findings, but it does not by itself identify a responsible individual. The reader cannot conclude "no one is responsible" - only "the report does not say who."
2. Rewrite "The valve was not closed" to make agency explicit without adding facts.
Read the worked answer
The constraint is that we do not know who should have closed it, so any rewrite must expose the gap rather than fill it with a guess.
Options:
- "The valve remained open" - converts to a stative description; accurate but still hides agency.
- "No one closed the valve" - makes the omission explicit and implies a responsible party exists without naming them. This is the cleanest faithful rewrite.
- "The valve was left open by the shift team" - only acceptable if the report elsewhere establishes the shift team's responsibility; otherwise it invents a fact.
Best answer: "No one closed the valve before the test." It converts a hidden-agent passive into an explicit omission while leaving the identity of the responsible person to be established by evidence, not by grammar.