Which greeting strikes you as more sincere? We wish you a Merry Christmas. or, as above, A Merry Christmas is wished to you by us.
And which would make a better hit song? I heard it through the grapevine. Or, Through the grapevine it was heard by me. You get the picture.
Maybe you would laugh at the silliness of these alternatives, but why? The basic message is the same.
However, the messages are structured differently. The first set of statements is in the active voice, and the second set is in the passive voice.
In the active voice, your focus is on the actor – the one in the sentence who is doing the action. For example, the sentence, The boy hit the ball is in the active voice. The one who did the action, the boy, is the subject of the sentence. In the passive voice, the one who does the action takes a back seat. You might find the actor in a phrase that starts with by or nowhere in the sentence at all. The subject of the sentence, by contrast, is the object of the action.
For example, The ball was hit by the boy is in the passive voice. The object of the action of hitting (the ball) becomes the grammatical subject of the sentence. The one who did the action (the boy) is relegated to a side phrase that starts with by.
If you imagine each of your sentences as telling its own story, which story would be more gripping? A story about a boy, or a story about…a ball?
The active voice echoes our natural attraction to actors over objects. By placing the actor into the grammatical subject of the sentence, the active voice focuses our attention on the people or entities that are capable of doing things. This revs us up in a way that passive voice never will. That’s why when you write in the active voice, your sentences ring with energy and connection. People grasp them after reading them once.
In contrast, by obscuring who did an action, the passive voice enables writers to disconnect actors from their actions and blur accountability. Why do you think it is so popular in large organizations?
Passive voice also slows down our processing time as we try to identify who are the actors in a sentence. As a result, the passive voice tends to breed formality and distance. Government contracts reek of the passive voice, and legal documents suffocate in it.
In the Worktalk writing training programs, we practice extensively to transform sludgy passive sentences into zingy active ones. I tell people that if they ever forget the difference between the active voice and the passive, they should remember this example:
A Merry Christmas is wished to you by us is in the passive voice.
We wish you a Merry Christmas is in the active voice.
And we do.
Take me to your leader! Communication woes drain the lifeblood of an organization. Connect me with your decision-makers and see how Worktalk can transform communication in your world. Contact me at lizd@worktalk.com or 310.396.8303.