Writing and Editing Advice from a Book Editor: Passive vs. Active Voice

A magic trick to instantly improve your writing!

One of the quickest ways to improve your writing is to master the use of active voice. In everyday speech, we often use passive voice. However, when storytelling, active voice is much more engaging, vivid, and well, active.

It is completely normal to write your entire draft and realize at the end that you primarily used passive voice. We use it all the time without thinking because our brains don’t necessarily process in active voice. Fear not! You can train your brain to think in active voice when writing to improve your style and storytelling as you write, saving you extra editing in the future! Once you have honed this skill, your writing will flow and engage readers much easier.

Here is a quick overview of the difference between the two with examples and possible rewrites for sentences that use passive voice:

Active vs. Passive voice

The defining difference between the two lies in who (or what) receives the emphasis of the action. In passive voice, the receiver of the action is the main focus of the sentence. In active voice, the doer of the action is the focus. Below are simple sentences to demonstrate this difference.

Passive Voice: The boy was eating ice cream. (What was being eaten? The ice cream.)

Active Voice: The boy ate ice cream. (Who did the eating? The boy.)

Notice how much more direct and concise the sentence using active voice is. This type of sentence structure is preferred in fiction for clarity and flow. The focus shifts to who was performing the action, rather than the subject of the action.

One easy way to spot passive voice is to look out for “to be” verbs. Most of the time, but not always, the use of these verbs makes a sentence passive and a simple rearrangement can switch it to active voice. “To be” verbs are helping verbs like is, am, are, was, were, being, been, will be. Here is another example:

Passive voice:

“Nothing was more exciting to me than a rainy day.”

Active voice:

“Nothing excited me more than a rainy day.”

Notice the second sentence is only a few less words, but it got the same exact meaning across and flowed a bit better. As you read your draft, or write it, keep an eye out for these “to be” verbs and use them as an indicator of an opportunity to potentially restructure the sentence in a more engaging way.

There will be many exceptions to this concept. You can’t remove every single sentence that has passive voice because 1) that would be really difficult and 2) it probably wouldn’t sound very natural either. It is important to have a balance between the two and eliminate passive voice where you can, especially when it improves the sentence and scene itself.

I hope some of you find this helpful, especially new writers! This is a skill that will develop over time and, eventually, you will find yourself writing the first draft of your novel mostly in active voice!

‘Til next time!

Thank you for reading! If you have any requests for future topics to be covered in my Writing and Editing Advice from a Book Editor series, please comment or message me!