For Impact, Use the Active VoiceIf there is one step you can take to give your business writing more impact, it is this: in 95% of cases, use the active voice. The active voice uses the following sentence structure: subject, verb, object. When you reverse this order—object, verb, subject—you have the passive voice. For example: • The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object). (This is
the active voice.) To complicate matters, there is a second form of the passive voice in which the subject is not mentioned at all. For example, • Your application (object) has been turned down (verb). Notice, the subject is missing, so we don’t know who did the turning down. This is called the divine passive. Writers often use the divine passive as a way to avoid responsibility for their statements. Things are just mysteriously done, while nobody actually does them! Overuse of this form suggests evasion. The most obvious result of overuse of the passive voice, however, is that it slows down the ‘voice’ of the material, giving it a stilted, unnatural feeling. The order of the words in an active voice sentence is the normal form of expression in English, and the passive voice is really speaking backwards. After a while, this becomes irritating to readers, and might well make them react unfavourably to your message—exactly the opposite of what you want. Take a look at a long letter or memo which you found particularly tedious to read, and you will probably find it is bogged down in passive voice sentences. This should be a major focus when you begin editing your writing. Each time you see the passive, try reversing it to make the active voice. You’ll find it makes your writing more vigorous, powerful and reader-friendly. Feel free to use this or other articles on this site in your in-house publication or online newsletters, so long as you make no changes, use the entire article, and add the following attribution at the end: Helen Wilkie speaks at conferences and conducts corporate training sessions on all aspects of business communication. She is the author of Message Received and Understood! and The Hidden Profit Center. Contact her by phone at 416-966-5023, by e-mail at hwilkie@mhwcom.com or browse her main website at www.mhwcom.com
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