How to eliminate passive voice in your writing
Active voice makes sentences more powerful and copy more clear. Here’s how you can avoid slipping into punchless prose.
It isn’t that difficult, actually—you do it all the time—but it’s very easy to make the mistake of slipping into passive voice throughout your work.
Passive voice, left unchecked, slaughters reader interest more efficiently than a glaring typo.
When a reader catches a small misspelling, they at least can chalk it up to a mistake, but when they read too much passive voice in your writing, well, they just think you’re boring.
How to spot passive voice in your writing
You end up with passive voice when you get your nouns out of order within a sentence. The doer, not the thing done to, should precede the verb in the sentence. For example:
“James wrote a killer blog post.”
“The killer blog post was written by James.”
You already know the difference in readability between those two sentences, and that’s because passive voice usually doesn’t feel right or sound natural to you.
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