They worked wonders for me so I’ve included examples from my own first drafts that you might find helpful. What’s harder (but you actually need) is a system to naturally gravitate towards the active voice.īut you can practice these exercises every day to make a gradual transition. Yes, they’re accurate, but no writer worth their salt would have any trouble identifying passive voice here. “The war zone was entered by the soldier”, “the murder of Nina had been carried out by Alan”, “the money was lost by Peter” are examples they use. Most of the top-ranking “exercises” are directed at 5th graders. If you Google this section, you’ll find unhelpful results. Exercises to transition to the active voice Passive voice is our brain’s default setting, and you need to make a proactive effort to ditch it. Also the brain monitoring recorded rapid electrochemical activity when there was passive voice. In both groups, students writing in passive voice did so quicker than those writing in the active voice. The second group had blank cards and was asked to write a sentence describing what could be on the cards. The first group was shown images and graphs on their flashcards and was asked to describe them. In a research experiment, the duo showed flashcards to two groups of students and monitored their brain activity. Strang-Ng from Cornell University decided to find out. Even authors who (quite literally) wrote the books on Writing, like William Strunk and George Orwell, default to passive voice occasionally. Humans are hardwired to operate in passive voice. Today I’m going to share my learnings with you so you can avoid the mistakes I made (and retain those top clients). So I went down a rabbit hole of learning why we talk in passive voice, how to get comfortable with active voice, and practice exercises. I knew something needed to change - and quickly - if I wanted to build a career as a writer. The email read “Bani, we’ve gone through the piece - and while we loved the perspective you bring - our editors don’t have the capacity to correct so many instances of passive voice.” Until I got fired from a project over it.

It was my safe space.Īfter all, I'd grown up being told that the passive voice was 'objective,' 'unbiased,' and 'professional.' And I was writing for an educated, intelligent, executive audience - “unprofessional” was the last thing I wanted to be. When I started writing for a digital audience, the passive voice was all I knew. Turn passive voice to active How I switched from passive to active

Passive voice to active voice converter