I was reading through some old essays and papers that I had written early on in my college career, and noticed a common trend. I loved to use passive voice. After thinking for a while, I realized that I wrote in passive voice because it sounds prophetic; almost scholarly. It wasn't long before I started to find comments on my papers hounding me about my excessive use of passive voice. Unfortunately, the hounding and point deductions were not enough to make me stop.
I finally decided to make a change in my writing about two years ago and I haven' looked back. Reading the pages about active and passive voice in the book and doing the exercises helped to reinforce and enhance my knowledge of the difference between the two.
The verbs assignment that we had to do for this week was actually fun to do. Mostly because I remembered the one way I would remember transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. In high school, I could never remember the difference between the two until I found a profanity laced video online that helped me to learn transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. While the contents of this video contains words you would not say in front of your mother, it helped me to learn the basic usages of these verbs. Thank you, Internet.
Using passive voice is a hard habit to shed. It makes reading the writing much better though. And I agree, thank you internet.
ReplyDeleteI have a hard time with passive voice too! Especially with school papers. At first it sounds like a more intelligent way to say it, but all it really does is bog down your writing.
ReplyDeleteUsing passive voice also increases word count!
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