Better writing: The active voice

Because it’s more direct and easier to understand, the active voice is preferable to the passive voice.

With the active voice a subject (noun) acts (verb) on an object (noun). In the passive voice the object is acted on by the subject.

For example:

Active: Andy kicked the ball

Passive: The ball was kicked by Andy.

The active voice makes for tighter writing and easier reading. It is more personal and less formal. You’ll notice in the example that the passive version uses six words while the active phrase required only four and has simpler grammar. It’s both economical and clear.

Typically readers find phrases written in the active voice easier to understand as they involve fewer stages – or as someone once said “fewer mental hoops to jump through”. This becomes important in more complex sentences and longer pieces of text.

The active voice also reads as if the writer is more confident about the facts. In contrast, phrases and sentences written in the passive voice often appear to be tentative or uncertain. You’ll often find bureaucrats and corporate managers hiding behind the passive voice’s ambiguities.

For example, in the phrase; “the claims have been analysed”, it’s not clear who did the analysis. On the other hand; “We analysed the claims” is pretty clear.

Things get worse when the writer resorts to using the word ‘it’ rather than ‘I’ or ‘we’:

In the sentence “It was decided no claims would be payable” the author is deliberately hiding behind the ‘it’ implying that authority comes from on high rather than identifying the person who did the deciding.

There may be times when you need to use the passive voice. We’ll look at them in another post.

Earlier articles: