Hey, everyone!
In today's post, I want to share one trick you can use to immediately improve your writing. By the end of this post, you should be writing more engaging text, regardless of the kind of writing you do.
What is your primary goal as a writer?
Before we get started, how would you answer the question above?
No typos?
Perfect grammar?
Finding brilliant ideas to write about?
Being an expert in your subject?
These are good answers, but they are all secondary goals. Whether you're writing an email, a novel, a presentation, or a social media post, your top goal should be to captivate your readers. No other goal matters if you slap together a san-serif snore, regardless of its technical perfection.
Drawing readers in
Tugging readers into your narrative is critical to capturing your readers' attention. Therefore, you must make them feel like an active participant in your writing.
Using active sentence structures or an active voice is the easiest way to engage readers. Active writing brings life and motion to your prose and invites readers to engage in your narrative.
Active vs. passive writing
The simplest way to understand active writing is to contrast it with passive writing. To make this comparison, let's first look at a contrived invitation to a birthday party. I'll start with a passive example. It will be over shortly, so please try to stay awake.
Hey, Mary,
There will be a party at my house on Saturday at 11:00 a.m. for my son, Billy. Your attendance will be appreciated. First, there will be games, and prizes will be handed out. Then, cake and ice cream will be served. It is hoped your family can come.
Cheers,
Amy.
Yawn! Can you see how we've popped this party before it began through passive writing? The invitation is tedious. The invitation leaves out essential details that make it impossible for Mary to engage. For example, who is throwing the party? Who will play games? Who will eat the ice cream and cake? These actions are not connected to anybody and don't do anything to pull Mary into the festivities. The party feels like it will happen to someone else in a passive vacuum of celebratory suck.
Yuck!
Let's breathe some life into this invitation.
Hey, Mary,
I'm throwing a birthday party for my son, Billy, at my house on Saturday at 11:00 a.m. We'd love for your family to join us in this celebration. First, we'll play some games together and give out prizes to the kids, then we'll all dive into the cake and ice cream. We hope you can come and are excited to see you at the party.
Cheers,
Amy.
Ah, much better! Can you see the action in this invitation? Amy is throwing a party. She loves the thought of Mary joining her family in the celebration. They will play games together, hand out prizes to the kids, and then dive into the cake and ice cream. Amy's active writing sparks excitement and anticipation. It yanks Mary's imagination into the party and gives her an emotional taste of the upcoming festivity.
A real-world example
"OK, Clinton. We've seen a contrived example, but does this happen in real life?" you ask.
Unfortunately, yes.
I found this passive example on LinkedIn in a social media post from Splunk. In the post, Splunk is celebrating one of their clients successfully passing their Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin test.
Does this passive writing make you feel excited for the recipient? To me, it feels lifeless. When I read it, I imagine a disinterested Splunk employee cramming a prefab certification into an envelope and only mailing it to the recipient because he mistook the mail bin for a garbage can. So let's fix this post using active writing.
Splunk is thrilled to award John Generic a hard-earned Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin certification. Great work, John!
Now, I'm part of this celebratory moment. I can visualize Splunk shaking John's hand and congratulating him on his hard-earned certification.
How can you activate your writing?
Here are three easy ways to check your writing to ensure it is active:
1. Eliminate the "was <action> by <actor>" pattern
We saw this pattern in the Splunk example, "...was issued by Splunk..."
Other examples include:
Passive: Tom was driven to the grocery store by Carl.
Active: Carl drove Tom to the grocery store.
Passive: The decision to fine Dave for speeding was made by the judge.
Active: The judge decided to fine Dave for speeding.
2. Look for words like am, are, will be, been, being, was, and were
We saw this pattern in the party invitation example, "...cake and ice cream will be served." Other examples include:
Passive: The car is being fixed.
Active: Ted is fixing the car.
Passive: The TVs were stolen.
Active: Burglars stole the TVs.
These words don't always indicate passive writing but can be clues to its existence.
3. Don't promote the object of your sentence to the subject.
This third check encompasses the first two but can be harder to see. Let's start with an example of active writing:
John ate the cake.
In this sentence, John is the subject performing the action, ate is the action, and cake is the object being acted upon. This is how you should structure your writing.
Here's a passive example:
The cake was eaten.
In the sentence, we're elevating the object (cake) to be the sentence's subject. We know the action is happening to the cake, but the writing fails to tell readers who is performing the action. They don't know who is eating the cake, so there's nothing for readers to relate to. This lack of a proper subject leaves our sentence feeling distant, disjointed, and dead.
Write actively!
Hopefully, this brief explanation illustrates how active writing improves communication and makes people more likely to read your work. Feel free to add your active writing solutions to the examples we've reviewed today and share them in the comments.