Avoiding the Passive Voice
This is actually a subject area that I’ve only really recently fully understood. I used to over-use the passive voice, and this really damaged my fiction. And as I’ve seen a number of other members here over-using the passive voice in their stories, I figured I’d write a short article on it.
So - and this is what I imagine a number of people may be asking - what is the passive voice?
Well, it’s kindda hard to explain… read the Wikipedia article on it and you’ll be left scratching your head. So, instead of trying to describe what the passive voice is, instead I’m just going to explain what it does, why it’s bad, and how to avoid it.
The passive voice takes the emphasise away from the action, causing the reader to feel detached from the story (and often, bored as well). For example, the passive voice could be: Jack began to climb the hill, whereas the active (good) version would be: Jack climbed the hill. It may be hard to tell if there is any significant difference between the two when only comparing a single sentence, but when the passive voice infiltrates an entire story, the effects build up and worsen (and can ruin a perfectly good story).
The following make up the passive voice:
- ‘ing’ verbs. You don’t want too many verbs ending with ‘ing’. Words such as ‘climbing,’ ‘crying,’ ‘begging,’ (etc) are naturally more passive than their ‘ed’ counterparts (‘climbed’, ‘cried’, ‘begged’). ‘He was ambling along,’ is passive, whereas active would be: ‘He ambled along.’
- ‘Starting to’ words. Often you may include unnecessary words before a character does something that detract from the story, rather than adding (such as my Jack example above). Phrases such as: ‘began to,’ ‘started to,’ (etc). You don’t need to say a person began to do X - just say he did X.
- Inactive verbs. ‘Was,’ ‘were,’ ‘are,’ ‘is.’ Don’t say: ‘There were five soldiers standing in front of him,’ but rather: ‘Five soldiers stood in front of him.’ The ‘there were’ is completely unnecessary, detracts from the sentence, and also naturally leads onto ‘ing’ verbs.
- Unnecessary adverbs. These are words that describe a verb, but are completely unnecessary. For example: ‘He walked quickly,’ would be passive (most passive adverbs end with ‘ly’). It would be much better to remove ‘quickly’ and replace ‘walked’ with a stronger verb that conveyed the same meaning, such as: ‘He strode.’ Of course, adding a passive adverb onto an ‘ing’ verb is even worse (‘He was walking quickly’).
‘Ted was walking slowly along down the road, minding his own business, when something happened. People began to appear all around him, coming out of thin air. Confused, he began to spin around, wondering where all the people had come from.’ - Passive voice (bad).
‘Ted ambled down the road, minding his own business. Groups of people appeared around him, out of thin air. Confused, he spun around. Where had they come from?’ - Active voice (good).
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