The Power of Active Voice

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From the course by University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

608 ratings

University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

608 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation

Writing well is one of the most important skills you can learn for success in the business world. Knowing how to write well allows you to deliver your ideas with the power they deserve. Good writing also conveys a sense of your professional excellence to the world around you. In this course, you'll master the simple, effective skills that drive all successful business writing. You'll create impactful documents that not only showcase your ideas, but showcase your own professionalism to your audience. The principles you learn in this course enable you to become a great business writer. They also provide the foundation for moving into Graphic Design and Successful Presentation, so that you can unleash your best professional self whenever--and however--you present your ideas in the workplace.

From the lesson

Activate Your Voice!

So, you've started to write a document . . . Module Four takes you beyond the scaffold and good grammar to provide you with specific tips that will elevate your language, infuse your writing with clarity, and amp up your ability to communicate your ideas effectively. Every lesson in this module is based on the principles you learned in Module One, and they form a checklist of techniques that you can apply to any business document to insure your ideas shine on the page. Short videos on emails and longer documents give you simple techniques for applying the lessons of this course to a broad range of your work.

The Power of Active Voice5:27

Limit Crutch Verbs2:30

Cut Prepositional Phrases2:32

Don't Repeat Words1:24

Always Proofread0:45

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Quentin McAndrew
Instructor
Department of English, University of Colorado Boulder

The next few videos are going to teach you more about how to activate your voice,

how to make changes to your writing that will immediately make your prose more

vibrant and make you a better writer.

We're going to start with active versus passive voice.

Changing from passive voice is one of the most important things you can do

to improve your writing.

What's the difference?

Well, let's take a look.

Here we have a picture.

If we read it from left to right, we would say, Jadi kicked Quentin in the head.

Jadi is the subject of the sentence, and

he is actively kicking Quentin in the head.

That's active voice.

If we flip the photo,

and then read it from left to right, we would say, Quentin was kicked by Jadi.

Quentin is the subject of the sentence, but she's not taking any action.

Jadi is.

Quentin, the subject, is passive.

I mean, look at me in that picture.

My hands are down, I'm hunched over, definitely passive voice.

Getting rid of passive voice is one of the most important things that you can do

to improve your writing.

I'm not going to lie.

Learning to recognize passive voice and edit it can take a lot of work, but

I'm here to tell you that that effort is 100% worth it.

I should be clear about one thing, passive voice is not grammatically incorrect.

You could argue with me that you shouldn't have to worry about it at all, but

there are three really important reasons to get rid of it.

Passive voice is indirect, it adds vagueness to your writing,

which is the opposite of the goals of this course.

Passive voice takes more words to write,

this works against our goals of clarity and waste no time.

Getting rid of passive voice adds energy to your writing and

makes you more interesting and vibrant.

Before we get too far, I should note for

the scientists in the audience that passive voice

is often the preferred choice for scientific papers, lab reports, etc.

Because it maintains the aura of objectivity.

When you're writing a scientific paper,

it's best to stick to the accepted convention in your field.

But when you're writing a memo to your peers in the office or

to your business partners, use active voice.

To understand passive voice,

it's useful to go back to the basic structure of an American English sentence.

The building block of our grammar works on a subject, verb, object formula,

as in, I taught the writing course, where I is the subject,

taught is the verb, and the writing course is the object.

But if you make the object of that sentence into the subject,

you'll write in passive voice.

In other words,

if I write, the writing course was taught by me, that's passive voice.

This is exactly what we did with the Jadi slide.

We can write in active voice, Jadi kicked Quentin.

Or in the passive voice, Quentin was kicked by Jadi.

You can also see that writing in passive voice adds

two extra words to the sentence.

Two extra words is no big deal, right?

Wrong.

If you're writing a memo, and it's all in the passive voice, the obscured action and

extra words act like an anchor and drag down your clarity and energy.

It can add hundreds of words to a document overall.

Another way to recognize passive voice is if the agent in the sentence,

the person or thing taking the action, gets introduced with by.

This is called the by agent.

You can simply write something like, the bass was played.

That's passive, and it's a complete sentence.

But you can double check to see if it's passive by adding a by statement at

the end of the sentence.

In this case, we'll add, by Dave.

If you can add a by statement to the end of the sentence, and

it makes sense, then you've written in passive voice.

This happened with our example, the writing class was taught by me.

There's a by agent there.

In the case of a sentence like, the shop was closed, you know it's passive

because you can add by the owner at the end, and it makes sense.

But you can't write, the owner closed the shop by the owner,

and make it a correct sentence.

That tells you that the owner closed the shop is in active voice.

Passive voice is sometimes used as a rhetorical technique by CEOs,

politicians, and other people in trouble to deflect blame.

Mistakes were made obscures the blame, while I made a mistake doesn't.

So, okay, you can recognize passive voice.

Now the question is, how do we fix it?

Well, that's actually pretty easy.

You usually already have the verb that you want to use right there in the sentence.

Take our example, the mail carrier was bitten by the dog, already contains bit.

You just need to switch your subject and object and use the verb you already have.

The dog bit the mail carrier.

That's active voice.

The exercises that follow will help you really understand how passive voice

weighs down your writing.

They'll teach you how to recognize it and edit it.

Give it a try.

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