There is nothing passive about good content

A big part of your story sense and narrative flow is the feeling of forward-moving energy in your writing. When the flow of your content pulls your reader forward, your readers go with you where you want to go. However, nothing wrecks the sense of momentum more than the use of passive verbs!

No, this is not a grammar lesson, but please bear with me while I rant about passive verbs. Passive verbs are "energy suckers" that drain the life out of your writing.

Passive verbs occur a lot in reports, such as the minutes of meetings, executive summaries, etc. No wonder so many of those kinds of reports are boring!

For example: "The meeting was held at 3 p.m. Wednesday, September 10."
Or "A decision was made to increase the marketing budget by 15%."
Or "Several dissenting viewpoints were heard by the task force before the vote was taken."

Ugh! Tedious indeed! Passive verbs do not convey power or authority; rather they convey the sense of some outside force acting upon people.

Compare now: "The task force held its meeting at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, September 10."
"The task force decided to increase its marketing budget by 15%."
"Several members disagreed with the budget increase and expressed their views prior to the vote."

Granted, the above sentences are not what you'd kill to read, but I've converted them to the active verb form, and you have to admit that the sentences do have a bit more energy.

Since passive verbs are so common in business writing, many writers of business books make the mistake of thinking that resorting to the passive makes them sound "official". They think it's a way of getting their own voice out of the way so that the "material" stands on its own.

But please DON'T get rid of your own voice! If you don't write in your own voice, you're going to sound tepid. Just because a piece of writing is factual doesn't mean it's voiceless. You want energy in your writing. Passive verbs do not make you sound authoritative. They just make your content boring.

Eliminate the passive. Replace it with the active. This is one very easy way to immediately enhance the authenticity and energy of your writer's voice. When you write anything, read it over and root out any passive verbs. Find a way to replace them with the active form of the verb. It's amazing how much this improves the entire effect of your content.