Avoid Passive Voice

In English, you have two options for creating declarative sentences (that is, sentences that make a statement): the active voice or the passive voice. The term voice is a piece of grammar jargon that refers to the relationship between the subject in a sentence and the verb. In the active voice, which we use the vast majority of the time, the subject does the action expressed in the verb. For example:

Our sales team visited the client's site.

"Sales team" is the subject. And they're the ones who did the visiting.

To say the same thing in the passive voice, you put the recipient of the action in the subject slot. That inverts the typical relationship between subject and verb. For example, here's our sentence above, rewritten in passive voice:

The client's site was visited by our sales team.

Here "site" is the subject and it received an action, namely, it "was visited." There's nothing ungrammatical about that sentence. It's perfectly legal. So what's wrong with using passive voice? The main problem is that because we don't hear it or read it very often, it's harder to decode. Our brains do a little skip step to sort things out.

Another problem with passive voice is that you don't actually have to say who did anything. Passive voice is the language of nonresponsibility and is frequently used as a way to communicate bad news:

A decision has been made to terminate your employment.

Combine these weaknesses of passive voice with a long sentence, throw in some big words and some jargon, and you have a recipe for incomprehensibility. Here is a prime example, again drawn from the executive summary of a real proposal:

A leveraging of problem similarities and process relationships to allow sharing of resources and solutions, will be needed to contain cost and staff expenditures and assure maximum payoff from effected solutions.

There are lots of problems in that sentence. The wandering comma is odd. It just shows up randomly in the middle. Maybe the author thought it was time to take a breath. Anyway, it's wrong, but it's the least of the problems. It's too long: it runs on for thirty-one words—nearly twice as long as the average length I've recommended. It contains some very odd word choices and usage ("effected solutions," "leveraging of problem similarities"). And it's written in passive voice: "A leveraging . . . will be needed . . ." By whom?

People normally use passive voice about 10 percent of the time. That's a good percentage for your writing, too.