![]() Choosing wiselyĪlthough favouring the active in your writing is a good general rule, you don’t need to worry about banishing the passive from your writing altogether. This makes for a smoother transition between sentences, and a smoother logistical journey for your reader. Your rebate can be paid directly into your bank account. If you have paid too much tax in the financial year, you will be entitled to a rebate of the overpaid amount. Whereas, if we use the passive version, we begin where we left off – with the rebate: We can pay your rebate directly into your bank account. If we follow that sentence with the active ‘We can pay your rebate …’, the customer reading the letter might be momentarily thrown by the sudden appearance of this ‘we’. So if we went by the general rule of favouring the active, we might say that the first option is better.īut what if we were preceding that with this sentence? These two sentences present the same information in two different ways – although the second one, the passive version, is missing the doer. The alternative is harder work: if you encounter a new and potentially complex bit of information at the beginning, you have to hold that in your mind until you reach the end of the sentence before you can comprehend the full meaning. This is because, as readers, we process information most effectively when we start with a foundation of something familiar, and only then add something new to that. It’s also best to introduce new information at the end of the sentence. You can do this by starting a sentence with information that you finished the previous sentence with, so like links to like. Writing that flows is writing that gets your message across best.Ī key part of creating writing that flows is linking one sentence to another. Reason three: You want to make your writing flow Unfortunately, your proposal wasn’t approvedĬould be a more gentle approach than directly stating who it was that said no. We might also soften bad news by making it more indirect using the passive. If you re-wrote this in the passive voice, you can be much more tactful, as you can take out the doer (them) altogether: While this can sometimes be ethically questionable (as in the classic evasive statement ‘Mistakes were made’), sometimes you can use this tactic instead to be diplomatic.įor example, if you had to reply to a customer or client (or even a supervisor) who had made a mistake, you wouldn’t want to highlight this fact by pointing the finger – which writing in the active voice would do: Using the passive voice means you can remove the doer of the action. Reason two: You want to be tactful or soften bad news The laptops will arrive on Monday, pre-installed with all the software you need. Since we’ve been in charge of their PR, the client has been photographed more than ever. When the patient was originally diagnosed, fewer treatment options were available. Can you see why it might not be necessary to try to rewrite them with the doer stated first? Have a look at these other examples (with the passive parts in bold). The prospective buyers don’t really need to know thatīob’s Conservatories of Hull added the conservatory to the house in 2004. ![]() The conservatory was added to the house in 2004. We really don’t need to know the pilot’s name.Īnd it can be the same with what you write at work sometimes: the ‘who’ isn’t actually relevant or could even be a distraction.įor example, if you were describing a property for sale, you might say: The fugitive is believed to be hiding in nearby woods …Īs linguist Geoffrey Pullum points out, there’s nothing wrong with a reporter who’s covering a forest fire stating: ‘Helicopters were flown in to put out the flames…’. When a news story breaks, the information about who is behind the actions might not yet be known – and the target of the action might well be more critical to the headline anyway. ![]() You hear this kind of passive a lot in news reporting. Reason one: You don’t know who the doer is or it doesn’t matter In some cases, the passive voice is actually the best choice. Generally, the active voice is the way to go. Yet the passive voice does have its defenders, who accuse the first group of oversimplifying matters. The active voice gets a hero’s welcome from most writing guides, which tend to demonise the passive voice as the root of all grammatical evil. ![]()
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