![]() In typical dialog, passive voice leads to less clarity and ends up being a bit more convoluted – understandably a good thing to avoid under normal circumstances. While active voice emphasizes the subject, passive voice deemphasizes the subject and focuses on the object. ![]() PASSIVE: The new blog is being written by me. Stepping back a minute, what is passive voice, and why are proper grammarians always trying to remove it from our discourse? Although there is a tool that can tell you, it’s easier to show through a couple examples: And if you’re a writer, editor, or marketer who works with engineers, no doubt you’ll agree. Passive voice use is quite common in engineering circles. In both cases, I could only push back with a nebulous complaint: “it sounds weird when you rewrite it the other way.” When he edited my work in the past, Paul would often point out too much passive voice usage in my drafts. A similarly excellent editor and copywriter Paul Leroux has writing skills that made his pieces on the QNX Auto Blog really shine. When we’re writing technical content, Nancy occasionally tries to strike my passive voice knuckles with her active voice ruler. There isn’t a single blog I’ve written where it says I’m below the recommended 10% threshold of passive voice content. However, it invariably also says that my writing uses too much passive voice. It often says my writing is difficult to read, which I outright ignore because I don’t think our material is intended to target your average eighth grader. There’s a tool that we use for our Third Law blog called Yoast SEO that analyzes content for search-engine optimization as well as writing style.
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