Hey there. If you do any kind of writing, promotional writing, you write articles, blog posts, email sequences, you might run across a problem during the editing process. You might find that you're writing in passive voice. What is passive voice? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to unpack passive voice, active voice, what it is, why it's important, and how to fix it here on the Resilient Faith Online Show. Welcome. I'm Arissa Shadrick, host of the Resilient Faith Online Show. I'm an online marketing coach and certified copywriter. In this podcast, you'll find a different perspective to the external and internal challenges we face as online content creators. Join me for some inspiration and practical tips as we create positive change online. To connect with me in my private Facebook group, go to Marissa Shadrick.com forward slash community. Hello, hello. How are you doing today? Marissa here. And I'm so happy to bring this subject to the podcast. How to fix passive writing. This is a question that comes up often with clients and people that give me copy to critique. They see the passive writing, they wonder how they can get out of the habit of writing in passive voice. And oftentimes it's hard to figure out how to fix it because they don't know what was broken in the first place. So we're going to unpack this in a very simplistic way to help you write stronger copy. Because anything that you write in the passive voice, it's not as clear, it's not as punchy, it's not as persuasive. So if you do any kind of writing, whether it's blogging, email sequences, you write for your landing page, opt-in articles, you want to listen in because active voice always improves your writing and your promotional content. But sometimes when we're writing sentences and we're in a hurry, passive voice can sneak in. So let's get started. First, let's start with what is active voice? Anything that you read, when it flows easily, when it's effortless, when you understand it and it's clear, most likely it's been written in active voice. And to make it really, really simple, active voice just has the parts of a sentence in the right order. In other words, the subject comes before the verb. We'll talk more about parts of a sentence, but it's the primary structure of a sentence that's written correctly. It's concise, it's engaging, the readability is better, it has better persuasion, it has a momentum and a rhythm of its own, and there's better connection between the writer and the reader. This is why we want to eliminate passive voice and always try to write in active voice. So active voice is something that allows the reader to enjoy what they're reading. As a reader, if you read something and it's easy and it's flows and you don't have to glance over it a second time or reread a sentence, most likely it's been written in active voice. So what is passive voice? Well, let me put it this way. If you ever met someone who's passive aggressive, and I think probably all of us have met someone like that, it's really frustrating and irritating because they don't say what's actually on their mind. Passive aggressive behavior is a pattern that indirectly expresses negative feelings instead of openly saying what they're thinking. They kind of circle around, they dance around the topic, and you just wish they would just come out and say what's on their mind, right? And be more straightforward. So they dance around and they indirectly express what they're trying to say. Now, passive voice in writing is very similar. It's a way of dancing around the topic and not really saying what you mean to say. So this is where we want to look at the parts of the sentence, and I'm just going to cover three parts. It's going to be very simple. We're not going back to English 101 or anything, but we need to understand subject, verb, and object. Those three things. So let's break it down. The subject is, of course, the person, place, or thing that is performing an action in a sentence. And the verb is the action word. The verb is the action that the subject is performing. Now verb could be anything like run, write, walk, work. Those are all verbs, action words. So we have the subject, the person that's performing the action, the person, place, thing, and we have the verb, which is the action word, and that could be anything like run, write. And then the object is the thing that receives the action. So I know it sounds like a lot right now to wrap your brain around it, but I'm going to give you some examples. So when we think of the parts of the sentence, what happens in passive voice is that the order gets mixed up. Instead of having subject, verb, and object, it gets flipped around. And it often starts with the object, verb, and then the subjects at the end of the sentence. And it creates this passive voice that's often confusing and hard to read. In passive writing, the subject doesn't do the action. The subject receives the action by the expressed verb in the sentence. The subject is acted upon. And so this is what creates this passive voice in your writing. So passive voice creates longer sentences, lack of clarity, creates confusion. People labor to read the content and understand what it is you're trying to say. So this is something that needs to be avoided when we're writing copy. So this is something that copywriters or any writers for that matter want to avoid because we want to keep people on the page. We want to keep them reading. We don't want to make them work at understanding what we're trying to say. And we don't want them to be confused and just get exasperated and click out. So in sentences with passive voice, the sentences become very unclear, very flat, less direct, very wordy. And often the subject performing the action is found at the end of the sentence. Okay, so there's a little clue for you. So let's go over a few sentences to give you an example. And if you listen carefully, I think you'll catch it and you'll be able to anticipate what I'm going to say to change the passive voice into active voice. So let's see if you can do this while I'm giving you the example of the passive sentence. So here it is. The gifts were wrapped by my daughter. There's a sentence, and that is written in passive voice. The gifts were wrapped by my daughter. So how do we figure out whether this is written in passive voice? Well, an easy little rule is to look at the verb first. Spot the verb in the sentence. In this case, it would be wrapped. The gifts were wrapped by my daughter. Wrapped. That's the action in the sentence. And then once we find the verb, we think who's doing it? Who's doing the action? Right? Who's who's performing that action? And in this sentence, it's not gifts. The gifts are not performing the action, it's daughter. So in this passive sentence, the gifts were wrapped by my daughter. Wrapped is the verb, daughter is the subject. But if you notice, daughter is at the end of the sentence. And we took the object, gifts, and put it in front in the sentence before the verb. And it makes it almost look like gifts is a subject, but it's not. So in this example of the gifts were wrapped by my daughter, if we would just take the subject and put it in the front of the sentence, we can fix it. But we first have to find the verb, then we find the subject. So let's try that. Let's flip it around. My daughter wrapped the gifts. Now it's in the right order. Subject, verb, object. My daughter, who is a subject, performed the action, wrapped, and wrapped what? The object is gifts. So now that we broke that one down, let's do another one. The new film, West Side Story, was directed by Steven Spielberg. Now, here's the problem with passive writing. Oftentimes it doesn't sound like it's wrong. It sounds like it's right. Now, passive writing is used in some academic papers, and it's also used somewhere else that I'm going to unveil at the end of the podcast. But in this sentence, the new film West Side Story was directed by Steven Spielberg. It sounds like it's okay, but let's give it the test. Let's look for the verb first. The verb is directed. Who did the directing? Steven Spielberg. And where do we find Steven Spielberg, the subject? We find it at the end of the sentence. Again, I'll read the passive sentence again. The new film West Side Story was directed by Steven Spielberg. So we find again the subject is at the end of the sentence. So we need to try to put the subject in the front of the sentence to correct the passive voice. So in this example, the new film West Side Story was directed by Steven Spielberg. If we flip it around and take the subject and put it in front, it will read Steven Spielberg directed the film West Side Story. See how that works? How we can actually correct a passive voice and turn it into active voice. Okay, let's do one more and see if you can do this. As I'm saying it, think of how you can flip the sentence and spot where the verb and the subject is so that you can get it in the right order. Here's the next sentence. The school children were startled by the fire alarm. What's the verb? Startled. Who startled the children, right? You have to think who did the action, who did the startling. So in passive writing, the sentence read like this. The school children were startled by the fire alarm. When we turn it active, we find the verb, we find the subject that performed the action, which in this case was fire alarm. We put it in the front, and now it reads the fire alarm startled the school children. I think if you just look at the verb first, if you're trying to figure out how do I change this? It sounds correct. How do I change it into active voice? Maybe you're using a tool that's saying you've got some passive writing that you need to edit and correct. Look at the verb and then track from the verb who's doing the action to find the subject. Just keep in mind that the subject ended up at the end of the sentence. So that is a little clue. But there's other ways to spot passive writing. You can read it out loud. Read your copy out loud. And if you're finding that you need to reread a sentence over and over again, go back and read it again because it's not clear the first time, take a look at it because chances are maybe it's wordy, maybe it's long. That's kind of a clue of passive writing. Another way to spot passive writing, like I said earlier, is to look for the subject. Where's the subject? Is it at the end of the sentence? And if, of course, your sentences are long, chances are they're long and wordy. You might take a look at that at the length of the sentence. Another thing you can do is search for to be verbs. That's T-O-B-E, to be verbs, words that could be little culprits of passive writing, such as am, is, are, was, were, been. You can also use find or search feature in a word processing tool to be able to find these. I know in Word you can do this to find some of these words and just do a search and see where these words are and see if you've written the sentences in passive voice, that also can help. And oftentimes, like I said earlier, tools like Grammarly will point out when you write in passive voice. So let's review quickly how to change passive writing to active writing. In a sentence, active voice always has a subject before the verb. The subject is performing the action. That is the key thing. If you had a highlighter, this is where I would have you highlight. The subject performs the action. So you look for the verbs first, and then you decide who is performing the action. So that would be the subject. And then you can make sure that it's in the right order subject, verb, and object. So that will make your sentences very clear, very concise, very direct, and in the case of copy, very persuasive as well. So keep in mind that writing in passive voice has become most likely a habit, and you can break that habit and you can begin to write in active voice by always thinking of the subject first. Start that way, and then you'll have less editing at the end. I know when I wrote a lot of passive writing, I realized it was directly connected with a lot of the insecurities I had. I didn't want to necessarily be as persuasive or make a claim or be the subject in a sentence. I wanted it vague. I know that sounds crazy, but oftentimes people that lack in confidence will often write in passive voice. And I discovered that, and as I became more confident in what I was doing, I was realizing that even my writing sounded stronger and punchier and better. So this is something that you can improve. This is a skill that you can improve. But just like I said earlier, it's not that passive writing is never used because passive writing is used in a lot of academic papers. And passive writing is also effectively used in the Bible. If you've ever taken a Bible verse and you've copied and pasted it and cited it on an article or maybe a blog post, you might find during the editing process that an alert pops up that there's passive writing. Well, that was intentional. The Bible is a love letter to us. We are the subject. God is talking about us and what he's doing for us, right? So the subject receives an action from heaven. Isn't that beautiful? So all of the passive writing that we see in the Bible, it reminds us that we didn't do it. We didn't perform the action. Grace, salvation, everything was done for us. And in this case, passive writing is perfect because the subject, you and I, receive God's action, God's love, God's forgiveness, everything. He's done it all. We are the recipients. So I think that's pretty cool to look at it that way. And hopefully, this will help you remember the difference between active voice and passive voice. It's important to keep that in mind so that you can write bold and stronger copy and you can begin to have higher conversion and also be confident in the things that you offer. Whether it's free or whether it's paid, be confident and know that what you're doing is actually serving people. You're helping them achieve a goal. So write boldly, get rid of the passive voice and start writing with active voice. So if you have a question about copywriting or passive voice, active voice, I would love it if you would DN me on Instagram. Just start typing in my name, Marissa Shadrick, and you'll see Marissa Shadrick copywriter, and you can follow me and message me there on Instagram. So until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Wait, before you go, if you found this podcast helpful, subscribe so you never miss an episode. Every subscription, review, or rating means so much to me. Remember, cultivate resilient faith online to create positive change in the world.