How to avoid passive voice
Being passive is not the best strategy. Not in sales nor in our life. When you’re trying to sell online, you’re trying to give your reader a certain energy, a certain motivation. That’s what copywriting is all about, motivating someone to do something with your words. And to achieve this goal, you have to put the reader in the middle of the action. But if you use the passive voice, you run the risk of putting your reader in the middle of inaction, comfort, nothing. Here are some pointers so you don’t forget how to avoid passive voice.
How to avoid passive voice: always remember your goal
Your goal is to make your reader an actor who will click. They must be the one to perform the actions, be the subject of your action verbs. If you use the passive voice, you take away their power to choose and act.
Google likes it simple
The passive voice requires the use of the auxiliary “to be” associated with a verb in the past participle. This makes the sentence structure more complex for Google and for web users to understand. The active voice is used more in the English language for its simplicity. A simple example to understand the difference between the two styles of voice:
Active voice: Bob drinks water
Passive voice: The water is drunk by Bob
Use the active voice. It will also allow you to better manage the length of your sentences by removing some very long and unnecessary phrasing.
How to avoid passive voice: show, don’t tell
Verbs in the active voice have one simple goal: to make the actions written to come into life in your reader’s head. More than an image, you build a movie in their mind. Imagine, for example, a car. Your text will have more impact on the reader if you talk about the car going through a forest rather than parked in a gray lot.
Remember your subjects
Switching from passive to active voice forces you to think about the subject of your sentence, and therefore to ask yourself how important the subject of the action you are writing about is.
When writing SEO content, it is important to remember how to avoid passive voice. If you immerse your reader in an active environment, where they are an actor, then they will more easily take action than if you drown them in a stream of passive sentences.