The last of our top five tips for writing for the web is to ‘be active’. This encompasses including calls to action and links, but perhaps most importantly, using the active voice.
The difference between the passive and active voice, and how you change one to the other is often something that we get asked about in training. So here’s a short blog post to help.
Active vs passive
To know the difference between the active and passive voice you need to identify the subject and the object of a sentence. Here’s an example of an active sentence:
Andrew edits web content.
In this sentence Andrew is the subject – he is active. Because there is an action the sentence also contains a verb – to edit. And the web content is the object – it is acted upon.
The passive form of this sentence would read:
Web content is edited by Andrew.
Andrew is still the subject and web content is the object, but now the passive object holds the focus of the sentence.
Benefits of using the active voice
The passive voice isn’t wrong, but it’s often a poor way to communicate your message. If you think it causes confusion for you as the author of content, imagine what it’s like for your audience. Using the active voice can make your content clearer, more direct and more engaging.
If you’re using Hemingway to check the readability of your content it will identify passive voice for you – watch out for the green highlights. You’ll see that it doesn’t ask you to remove all examples of passive voice from your writing. But it does give you a target (based on the length of your content) to aim for.
It’s ok to use passive voice when you intend to force the object into focus, for example:
Professor Chris Day has been appointed as the next Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University.
How to move from passive to active
The easiest way to change a sentence from passive to active is to turn it on its head. Put the subject of the sentence – the one doing the action – before the verb. Once you’ve done this you can rewrite the sentence to maintain its original meaning.
