| There are two things everyone—editors,
agents, teachers, writers of the writing books—tells
you when you start writing: Show, don't tell
and Use the active voice. How hard
can those simple declarative sentences make your
life? Damn hard. Like all writers, Grammar Girl
catches herself breaking both of these rules all
the time. It's so easy to tell what happened,
and so easy to use the passive voice. It's natural
to us.
Grammar Girl is feeling brave this month so she's
going to begin to consider style. But she's not
brave enough to do it all at once, so she's going
to take on a little something that has a big effect
on your style—using the active voice.
What is the active voice? There are
three simple ways to tell if you're using the
active voice:
1. The subject of the sentence is doing the
acting (do you understand this?).
2. The sentence is shorter (you do
understand this).
3. You're using a form of the verb "to
be" (ah ha! got it!).
Would you like an example? Here goes:
Version 1: The witch was scratched by the cat.
Version 2: The cat scratched the witch.
Subject acting: The subject
of the first sentence is the witch but the cat
is scratching her. The subject of the second sentence
is the cat and the cat is doing the scratching.
Length of sentence: The first
sentence has seven words, the second only five.
To be: "Was" is a
form of the verb "to be."
Okay, so now you're clear on using the active
voice and you've even tried a few sentences of
your own. But Grammar Girl hears you asking: Why,
oh, why am I using the active voice when the passive
voice is so much easier? Brevity, of course,
but you've already got that and who really cares?
No one.
But your reader, and thus your editor, does care
about directness. She cares about action. She
cares about concrete, exciting language. The passive
voice—It was not long before he was
very sorry that he had said what he has.—can
be boring but the active voice has zip—He
soon repented his words. So use the active
voice but be careful not to overuse it.
Grammar Girl's word of the month is moderation.
Use both voices in moderation. And good luck.
Grammar Girl
Grammar Girl (AKA Kate Austin) is a member of
GVC. She spends her days picketing with her trusty
apostrophe, wrangling troublesome commas into
place and double-checking her homonyms.
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