Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries as Mary Freeman, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing, and has discovered that there really ARE some good reasons to pay attention to grammar!
Active and Passive Voice:
What are they really and why should we care?
by Mary Rosenblum
You remember that English teacher, don’t you? The one who scribbled ‘passive voice’ all over your homework and gave you a C? And that pesky passive voice lurks forever at the edges of our memory, scented with chalk dust and the memory of those nasty red scribbles. Just one of those grammar things. English teacher stuff. Nothing that really matters, not once you’ve escaped that English teacher’s clutches!
Guess again, folks! Passive voice is a sneaky and insidious habit and it can really affect your introduction to a new reader. Would you show up at a job interview wearing old sweats and ratty sneakers? Wouldn’t you be better off to be wearing a clean, fresh outfit with a lot of positive visual impact? Well, that’s what passive voice does…it dresses your article or your story in sloppy soft sweats and leaves the reader yawning and flipping to the next piece.
Definitions Please!
Well, our English teacher and that red pen happened a long time ago. So just what is this pesky passive voice thing anyway? Simple. In active voice, the subject of the sentences does the action of the verb. In passive voice, the action of the verb is not done by the subject.
Active Voice: The dog bit the mailman. The dog is the subject of the sentence and it bit the mailman. Not a very nice dog, eh?
Passive Voice: The mailman was bitten by the dog. The mailman is the subject of the sentence. But he didn’t bite the dog, although he might have wanted to!
The party was arranged by Angelina. The table was graced with elegant china, and the room was illuminated by soft candlelight. The chairs were draped with rich damask in a dark crimson and the music was enjoyed by all the guests, who danced gracefully to the strains of ‘The Blue Danube’.
Okay, the above sentence is written entirely in passive voice. Nice visuals, we get the idea. So who cares? Besides that English teacher with the red pen and chalk dust fingers?
YOU had better care! If you want to sell your prose.
So Why Does It Matter?
Take a look at that sentence. Let’s pick out all the ‘empty’ words. These are the words that give us no information at all – words such as a, an, the. We can’t do without those articles, but there are many other empty words that we can do without. If you want to write strong prose, it’s time to start keeping house and sweeping these words out the door. Here is our paragraph again with all the ‘empty’ words in blue.
Th
e party was arranged by Angelina. The table was graced with elegant china, and the room was illuminated by soft candlelight. The chairs were draped with rich damask in a dark crimson and the music was enjoyed by all the guests, who danced gracefully to the strains of ‘The Blue Danube’.Well, we have….twenty five empty words here. So what? Well, let’s see what happens if we translate our ‘passive’ paragraph into active voice:
Angelina arranged the party. Elegant china graced the table and soft candlelight illuminated the room. Rich, dark crimson damask draped the chairs and the guests enjoyed the music, dancing gracefully to strains of ‘The Blue Danube’.
And now for our count: Wow! We have only eleven empty words. That’s is less than half of what we have in our passive voice paragraph, and I did this without changing the remaining words.
The Telepathic Hyperlink
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just imagine that scene as we write and add a hyperlink to the page so that our readers would instantly tap into that scene in our minds? Alas, we’re stuck with those black marks on the page or screen to transmit those images.
Powerful prose, regardless of what you are writing, or the quality of the content, depends on two things: strong visual images and lots of information in the minimum amount of words. We have to work mentally to turn those black marks on the page or screen into dark crimson damask or soft candlelight in our mind’s eye. The more words we have to process, the less attention we can pay to the image. We are too busy working to enjoy the view! So if you can pack your paragraphs with LOTS of information and few words, your readers will feel that they simply see that scene, as if you really have developed the ‘telepathic hyperlink’.
In addition, look at how an active sentence is arranged as opposed to a passive sentence.
The party was arranged by Angelina.
What do we see? Well, each of us will probably imagine our ideal of a party…loud music, crystal and champagne, whatever. Then we reach ‘was arranged’. This is a verb. Someone is arranging the party…but who? We don’t know. Not yet. So we have to file this verb until we acquire more information. Now we read ‘by Angelina’. Aha! SHE arranged the party. So we go back, and review or sentence in our minds, seeing Angelina perhaps setting the table, sending out invitations, or whatever ‘arranged’ evokes for each of us. So we have had to read the sentence and then see the picture. Now we move on to the next passive sentence in that paragraph, again, reading the sentence and then putting the picture together.
But look at the same sentence in active voice:
Angelina arranged the party.
We begin with Angelina…a pretty blonde in Victorian lace, a smart socialite in Givenchy, or whatever she is to us, then we see her sending out the invites or setting the table, and finally we see those people dancing, drinking, laughing. No back tracking! No assembling the final picture! It comes to us in ‘order’ so that we get all information as we need it in order to immediately build that image in our minds.
Active IS Active!
So it’s not just an English teacher thing or the obligation to use ‘correct English’. Rather, active voice allows us to bring that image up instantly to the readers, rather than force them to wait and wait while that slow page loads! Hey, if you find two similar websites and one loads in a second and the other takes half a minute…which one are you going to visit? I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do with my time than wait for a slow page to load!
So pay attention to active and passive voice. Get rid of those empty words that fatten your word count to no purpose and make that picture load slowly in your readers’ minds. Using active voice can make a huge difference in your prose without changing anything else at all!
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