#ACTIVE VERSUS PASSIVE VOICE FREE#

Passive: Her mouth was covered with her hand. Let’s look at another example where a passive voice is used:Īctive: She covered her mouth with her hand. While passive writing isn’t wrong in a grammatical sense, it can weaken your writing, not only because it diminishes the impact of your words, but also because passive sentences often sound awkward and unnatural when compared to their active counterparts. In passive writing, the subject is being acted upon rather than doing the action. You can see how the first sentence is much cleaner and more concise. In the second case, it’s the item that is receiving the action-the sandwich-that is emphasized. In the first case, the subject ‘she’ is placed before the action.

#ACTIVE VERSUS PASSIVE VOICE FREE#

It also results in more streamlined sentences, free of clutter and unneeded words. Active writing tends to feel more vibrant and usually offers more clarity. In the simplest terms, active writing places the subject who performs the action at the heart of a sentence. ‍ The mail is the object What is active writing? I picked up the mail from the post office. Before we dig in, here is a quick recap on subject, object and verbs. The biggest indicator of passive voice is the subject being acted upon by the object (either explicitly or implicitly), rather than the subject doing the action. Not everything you write should or needs to be active (though it should be most of the time). Contrary to some beliefs, sometimes passive voice does make sense. In this article, we’ll explore what active and passive writing is and when you should use them. But what do either of those things really mean and why do they matter to your story?

Newer writers, especially, may resort to passive voice when they first start writing. You’ll often hear the advice to write in an ‘active voice’.

Active versus passive voice