STOP Using Passive Voice

What’s good, y’all? Today, I want to talk a little about using the passive voice and how to weed some of that out of your writing. 

Passive voice is, essentially, a sentence structure where the subject of the sentence receives the action rather than performing it. It’s actually something you see a lot in news reports when media outlets are trying to avoid putting blame on something. 

For example, “Three people were shot today” as a headline is passive because the action was performed on the people rather than someone or something performing the action. In this case, it doesn’t name the entity responsible for the shooting. If you read that sentence alone, it feels as if some magical entity performed the action but not something that is easily understood. 

Or another example, “The air conditioner was invented in 1902.” And put that next to its active counterpart, “William Haviland Carrier invented the first modern air conditioner in 1902.”

It’s pretty clear which of these sentences is the strongest. 

Or the old classic, “Mistakes were made.” Hahahaha. Who made them? That’s kind of the most important part that the sentence skips over. 

Passive voice is a weaker sentence structure, and I think it needs to be avoided as often as you can. 

Like everything in writing, there is a time and place for it, but it’s something that needs to be done as sparingly as possible. 

The reason this is important is because passive voice weakens the clarity of your writing. It leaves too much too ambiguity. In other words, it’s you giving bad directions or no direction to your reader. 

Our job isn’t to tell readers what to think or how to feel about things. But it is our job to point them in a direction and make it clear where we want them to go. We need to point them to what we want them to think about, but we can’t tell them what to think. 

And passive voice leaves too much for the reader to do on their own. 

Another thing the passive voice does is take action out of your work, and that’s probably the last thing most of us want to do. 

Our stories depend, for their lives, on our being active and moving the story at a good pace, pushing the reader further and further into our stories to get the engaged. If you’re relying too much on passive voice, you are handicapping yourself because you can’t get specific enough. 

Remember that in fiction, the devil truly is in the details. Being direct about the action is what drives a story. 

You want to keep your sentences active so that you story moves with purpose. 

So, as you’re going through your work, try to identify those weaker sentences and turn them into active, strong sentences. 

I promise it’ll strengthen your work. 

Happy writing, y’all.