Things writers do to drive me crazy, part 3

I’ve advised against using the passive voice before. Sure, there are places where it’s warranted. (See what I did, there?) But those are rare. 

To clarify what passive voice means, let’s contrast it against the active voice:

Active: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Passive: The lazy dog was jumped over by the quick brown fox.

In that example, the passive sentence is two words longer than the active, but adds no information. In other words, using active voice allows you to tell the story faster. 

Grammatically, we can define an active sentence as one where the subject of the sentence, the fox, performs the verb, jump. In contrast, the subject of the passive sentence, the dog, is what the verb, still jump, gets performed on. You can take the final phrase, “by the quick brown fox,” out of the sentence without affecting it grammatically. The reader will not know who or what performs the action.

That’s an example from an elementary schoolbook, but passive voice plagues even books aimed at adult avid readers. Here are a couple of other examples from a manuscript I edited recently: 

• It was less dangerous than other parts of the city, but it was still patrolled by more police officers than other areas as it was wealthy.

Now read this: 

• More police officers patrolled this part of the city than poorer ones, which kept the crime rate down.

Or

The valley was surrounded by rolling hills, and fine sandy beaches 

versus

Rolling hills surrounded the valley and its fine, sandy beaches.

There are kinds of writing that require passive voice. For example, scientific reports emphasize the action performed, rather than the person or agency performing it. “The contents of the test tube were poured into the beaker,” for example, rather than “I poured the test tube contents into the beaker.” The reason is that, in science, the results of a procedure are what’s important, not the person performing it.

When it comes to telling a story, active voice keeps the readers engaged.

Think of it this way: what kind of movies draw the biggest audiences? What are the usual summer blockbusters? 

Action movies.

Action sells. Action puts bums in seats.

Get the picture? 

How to avoid the passive voice

I always tell writers they have to rewrite at least twice. Once you have finished writing your great novel, story, article or whatever your project is, put it aside for a while. A day is good. Then read it from the beginning, checking, as you do, for typos and grammatical errors. And for passive voice.

Check for the number of times you use giveaway words like “by,” as in “The victim was shot by the perpetrator.” Or “She was brought to the brink of ecstasy by his touch.” Then turn those sentence around.

Another giveaway is “was” or “were” as an auxiliary verb. For example:

• He didn’t know what she was writing about until the article was published.
• Those were my takeaways, at least, and they were only reinforced in the days and months that followed.

Try these:

• Only when the article appeared in the newspaper did he know what she wrote about.
• The days and months that followed reinforced my conclusions.

You don’t have to do it all by yourself

One rule of publishing I always follow is: You cannot effectively proofread your own writing.

Before sharing your creation with the world, share it with at least one other person who can check it for typos, punctuation errors and passive sentences.

In other words, we all need editors. I turn to editor Gary Henry and proofreader Joy Lorton for all my books and major projects. I invite you to email them to ask whether they can help you.

And of course, you can also contact me with questions, or if you have written a book and need editing.