Let’s talk about voice. Understanding the voice of your writing is very important to improving the overall quality of the message. The most important distinction is active vs. passive voice. Most of the time, you are going to want to write in the active voice. It uses a logical, more satisfying word order. Equally important is to know the difference between the two so that you can skillfully use whichever is best suited for your rhetorical situation. This post will teach you both of these concepts as well as showing you when to use passive instead of active voice. Let’s take a deep dive into both.

 

Active voice:

In active voice, the subject of the sentence acts upon the verb. It may also perform the verb upon the object if there is one. This means that active voice leads with the subject, followed by the verb, then the object. Let’s look at some examples.

Jack jumped over the table

The cat scared the mouse

Every night blackens the town.

Notice how each of these simple sentences follow a subject-verb-object word order. This is advantageous in English writing because it reads more naturally.

 

 

Passive voice:

Passive voice does the opposite. A sentence is in passive voice when the subject is acted on by the verb. You can see how a reader would have a harder time relating to this type of sentence. While it may be an abstract concept to imagine how you’ve been acted upon by a verb, doing one is a natural thing. Let’s change the above examples into passive voice.

The table was jumped over by Jack

The mouse was scared by the cat.

The town is blackened each night.

You will also notice that the active examples are shorter. This is a direct result of the stylistic choice because passive voice requires the writer to craft more wordy sentences. Make your choices skillfully.