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Why is the active voice better than the passive voice in the following sentence? I really feel that the passive voice fits perfectly well.

"The marketplace is filled with intense competition"
"Intense competition filled the marketplace"

"The jar is filled with sand"
"Sand filled the jar"

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    Welcome to ELL.SE. Active voice is not automatically better than the passive voice; the passive exists for a reason, and there are cases where it is to be preferred. Please edit your post to provide some background: did a teacher or textbook tell you to avoid the passive? Is this a classroom exercise?
    – choster
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 16:55
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    @choster: The "background" (such as it is) is that I couldn't answer the matter of any possible semantic difference between two structurally similar examples that OP asked me about in an earlier comment. I see that sadness filled her eyes and her eyes filled with sadness are equally common. But do they mean the same?
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 17:02
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    @FumbleFingers "But do they mean the same?" That's not really what the question, as posed, has asked. (Although if they do mean different things, that would certainly be one reason for using the passive over the active.) In this case, however, I question whether any of the sentences are actually active in the first place. For instance, the word filled could be acting as an adjective rather than a verb. In other words, it could be a description of the jar's current state—not of a missing agent who performed a filling acting.
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 18:24
  • @JasonBassford: I quite agree it's debatable whether either sentence is actually active in the first place. Obviously this kind of reversal doesn't actually work very well with OP's specific jar/sand example, but both versions of my eyes/sadness example are very common, and seem to me to be semantically equivalent. Would you be happier if OP edited in my example instead, ignored the irrelevant reference to "subjunctive" and simply asked Are these both valid, and do they mean the same? If so, how exactly does the syntax work?
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 18:31
  • (If we had a migration path to ELU, I could easily be persuaded that this question would be a better fit there! :)
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 8, 2018 at 18:34

3 Answers 3

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This is not the passive voice.

There is an adjective "filled", which is complemented by a prepositional phrase "with sand" (and that is the correct idiomatic phrase)

A passive voice sentence could be

The jar was filled by the boy.

There can be ambiguity in some sentences with adjectives like "filled" that have been formed from past participles. In this case the use of the "with..." phrase and the implications of using the present tense indicate that "filled" is an adjective and not a participle.

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“The jar is filled with sand” is not really the kind of sentence they object to (or should be objecting to). Rather, it’s when the passive voice makes the sentence awkward and unwieldy (“I was told by him to shut the door” rather than “He told me to shut the door”) or, worse when it’s used in a cowardly manner to avoid naming names (“mistakes were made”). But there are lots of valid reasons to use the passive voice — especially when the object of the sentence should be emphasized over the subject. (Notice above that I just used the passive voice — “when it’s used in a cowardly manner” — because it’s the word, not the user, that’s more important to our discussion.)

“The jar is filled with sand” is perfectly fine. “Sand fills the jar” would be a little bit odd, in fact, unless you’re talking about the action of filling up the jar, rather than the state of being filled with sand.

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In the two examples you mention, the passive voice makes it difficult to tell if the action of filling is occurring now (verb form), or if the filling has already occurred (adjective form). These paint two very different pictures.

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