We don’t know (or don’t want to reveal) the do-er of the action:.Active Voice: In a fit of pandemic anxiety, she ate all the snacks in the cupboard.Īs I mentioned earlier, however, sometimes passive voice makes sense.Passive Voice: All the snacks in the cupboard were eaten by her in a fit of pandemic anxiety.In addition, as we give more details, passive voice sentences become more convoluted and harder to read compared to active voice: Or in the classic political line: Mistakes were made. They don’t point fingers at the do-er of the action. Passive voice sentences are also more wishy-washy (which is why they’re so commonly used by politicians). Passive just Tells what happened: The snacks were eaten.Active is easier to Show: She ate all the snacks.In contrast, passive voice sentences bury the actor and the acting so they tell what happened rather than show events. It’s easier for them to show and not tell our story. With those examples above, we can see several of the problems with passive voice.Īctive voice sentences are better at forming a picture for readers. Why Should We Usually Avoid Passive Voice? It’s still the “snacks,” so even with the extra information, the sentence is still an example of passive voice. It’s “her.” But “her” is not the subject of the sentence. Here, we now know who’s doing the eating. What if we gave more details? For example: We know those snacks didn’t eat themselves, as they’re the recipient of the action, not the do-er of the action. Here, the noun phrase in the subject of the sentence is “all the snacks.” Who’s doing the eating? Not the snacks. In contrast, passive voice is a sentence structure where the noun doing the acting with the verb is not the subject of the sentence: Who’s doing the eating? She is, and she’s the subject of the sentence, so the sentence is in active voice. Those are examples of active voice because the noun in the subject of the sentence is the one doing the acting with the verb. The next level of complexity is to add an object, a “what” for the verb to act on: First, let’s start with the basics… What Is Passive Voice?īasic sentences in the English language are constructed with a subject and a verb: And sometimes it does make sense to write in passive voice, but we’ll get to that later. Every aspect of the English language, from adverbs and slang to future tense and passive voice, has its place in our writing-craft toolbox. That said, I won’t go so far as to call passive voice bad. They make actions clearer, help with showing our story, and are just plain easier to read. What is passive voice and how can it cause problems in our story? Click To TweetSentences in active voice are, well…more active for readers. And yes, that advice usually applies to story writing too. In school, we might have heard that passive voice is bad or to be avoided. Let’s talk about what passive voice is and how to tell when the word was is not a sign of passive voice. Yay for another great idea for a post! *smile* Especially as I’ve haven’t talked much about passive voice here. It’s one of my pet peeves that editors and other authors too often assume that “I was eating” is passive voice. “Perhaps in some future post, you could clarify more about the past continuous tense. In the comments of that post, Kassandra Lamb (a frequent guest poster here) brought up another verb tense that often causes issues: Last time, we talked about the past perfect verb tense and how it helps us indicate to readers that a story event happened before the past tense of our novel. I wasn’t intending on doing a series on various grammar points, but… People have been bringing up common misunderstandings in the comments, so I’m still here, appreciating all the post ideas.
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