Writing Passive Voice? - I Was And Didn't Even Know It!
Are You Writing Passive Voice?
When creating your posts/pages do you give much thought to grammar?
What Is Passive Voice
In Layman's terms, Passive Voice is when the subject of the sentence is acted upon.
Example of a Passive Voice Sentence:
The brakes were slammed on by her as the car sped downhill.
The action (slamming brakes) is acting upon the subject (her).
Example Of The Active Voice Sentence:
She (subject) slammed on the brakes (action) as the car sped downhill.
Spotting Passive Voice
You want to look for a form of "to be". These could be words such as:
- Is, Are, Am, Was, Were
- Have Been, Has Been, Had Been
- Will Be, Will Have Been, Being
followed by a past participle (typically expresses completed action), typically, but not always, ends in "ed".
More Examples: Passive Voice Vs Active Voice
This Product can be bought in our workshop
Customers can buy this product in our workshop
The bags are checked by a security guard
A security guard checks the bags
The employees are informed about....
The manager informs the employees about.....
More Information On Passive Voice
There is defiantly more information about recognizing, using/or not using, and how to spot the usage of passive voice online but, my intent was just to bring awareness to this part of the grammatical construction.
The use of passive voice is just one of the analysis components for readability in Yoast SEO
In Conclusion
As brief as this post is, I hope that this has been helpful to you. I do believe this information is very beneficial while composing content on our websites or really, in any writing that we do.
Are you writing passive voice on you blogs? Now you know what they are, how to spot them, and how to correct them using active voice.
Be sure to click the Like Button and leave a comment below. Thanks!
Make The Effort - Great Things Will Happen!
Suzette
Recent Comments
23
This is good information Suzette. Thank you.
I am used to Yoast advising me about Passive voice and try to take time to make changes. Also, I intend at those times to do a study of Passive voice so as to understand how it works. As I have not yet taken time to study this, your information is valuable :)
That is awesome Lauren. That is what I am currently doing with this new site. I had several posts and pages already created when I switched to the Yoast SEO plugin.
I noticed that using passive voice in my content was extensive.
With having only a limited amount of content on this site, I decided to go through each post and page, and follow the recommendations.
I have seen much better search results since doing this.
Thanks for sharing, I will be aware of the way I am wording things more now.
Have a Great Day!
Tracy
Thank you Tracy, I appreciate the reply. I do believe that be being aware of the over usage of passive voice sentence construction has helped with better optimizing my posts and pages.
I am finally seeing my posts and website ranking on pages 1 & 2 opposed to seeing my google + posts ranking. Not to say that Google+ posts ranking is a bad thing.
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I've been using Site Content here at WA to write posts, and it told me a few times that I was writing passive voice. I didn't know what it meant, and I didn't see anything wrong so I ignored it.
Now, I get it. Thanks for the explanation.
Hey Gary, good to hear from you. Thank you for reminding me about the Site Content. I keep forgetting about that awesome feature here at Wealthy Affiliate.
Glad I could clear things up for you a bit about writing passive voice.