Passive-aggressive, Part 1

One of the best steps you can take to make your writing more forceful and vigorous is also one of the simplest, encapsulated in three simple words: Avoid passive voice. If you prefer the power of positive thinking, it’s still three simple words: Use active voice.

Fortunately, you don’t need to revisit your high-school grammar lessons to learn what passive voice and active voice are. All you need to do is write sentences that describe actors performing actions (rather than states of being) as often as possible. Make the subject of your sentence an actor, and not a victim or recipient of an action.

For example, "The car was wrecked," is classic passive voice. The subject of the sentence, the car, is just sitting there like a piece of scenery, parties unknown having wrecked it. You could add a phrase to clarify it, making the sentence "The car was wrecked by a drunk driver," but that’s a weak, roundabout, wordy way of getting to the point, which is this active voice sentence: "A drunk driver wrecked the car." Here, the subject of the sentence is the drunk driver, who is an actor in this scene, rather than part of the scenery.

Why is active voice better than passive voice?

• Active voice takes fewer words. In the previous, relatively simple example, we shortened the sentence by two words. A complex passive sentence can often be shortened by a greater margin, and over the course of a page, that adds up.
• Active voice presents the information in a logical actor-action flow, which is the way most people think and talk. It strikes a conversational tone. In his book How Not to Write, Terence Denman puts it this way: "We don’t use the passive much when we speak. If I asked whether you were going to the office party and you replied, ‘Terry, the party will not be attended by me,’ I’d have you locked up."
• Active voice helps eliminate ambiguity about who or what is responsible for the action described in the sentence. Passive sentences often fail to identify who is perform an action, or else they bury it in a clause tacked on at the end. "Mistakes were made" is a classic example that completely avoids accepting or assigning blame for the mistakes. Some call this the "exonerative passive." I prefer the less technical "weasel words."

We’ll look at some ways to spot passive voice and how to make it active next time.

Update on Monday, September 19, 2005 at 02:06PM by Roy Jacobsen

Part 2 is now online. Click here to view it.