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How To Spot Passive Voice And Eliminate It From Your Copy

Copywriting is a lot like posture…

There are a ton of things you are probably doing wrong that you don’t even realize.

What’s worse, you could be making the same mistakes over and over for years on end.

The number one copywriting mistake that all marketers make — costing them precious Google ranking positions?

Passive voice.

It’s the slouching of writing.

If you’re worried about it, you’ve probably been searching Google for stuff like “avoid passive voice” or “passive writing checker.”

You’ve probably discovered that most articles about it are confusing.

This might be your 5th article on the topic and you still might have no idea what passive voice even is.

We’ll not only explain passive voice in simple terms a Kindergartner will understand, but we’ll also give you a super simple hack to spot it in your writing.

Let’s dive in.

The main reason to drop passive voice is that it’s probably the easiest way to improve readability.

If you have a good readability score, then your readers stick around your content longer, which Google values, and rewards your page in search engine results pages (SERPs).

But the HBR, an established authority, is a little different than an SMB’s blog. Fewer competitors, too.

I know this will be a pain, but we have to go back to grade school for a minute.

Passive voice is one of those things that can get super complicated. It’s a stylistic thing, meaning there are tons of exceptions to it. That can get aggravating.

But generally speaking, passive voice happens when you put the subject (the thing doing the thing) after the verb (the thing getting done).

Joe is the subject of the sentence, or “the thing doing the thing.” “Hit” is the verb or the thing done by Joe, who is the subject. So if Joe comes before “hit,” the sentence is active. If he comes after “hit,” the sentence is passive.

Here’s a nifty video to break it down for you further…

There are cases where passive voice is acceptable. You might not know who the subject is. For example:

Passive voice is also acceptable if the subject isn’t as important as the action performed. For example:

The thing you want to focus on in this instance is actually the app, not Apple. Nothing is wrong with the second sentence, but you want to focus on the app more than the thing doing the thing (i.e., Apple).

And no, “app” is not the subject here, because it’s not doing anything. Something is being done to it.

If you’re still confused, don’t worry. I have a hack that will make this all easy.

To identify and then fix passive voice, you have to re-arrange your sentence so that the subject comes before the verb, not after.

If that still sounds complicated, here’s a really easy way to do it on the fly. Swap out the subject (the thing doing the thing) for “I.” Make yourself the subject in the first person.

This is a passive sentence. It reads fine, but let’s say you want it to be active. Eliminate the subject, or the thing doing the thing, and force-replace it with the first person “I.”

Doesn’t make any sense, right? But it would if you put the subject in front of the verb, or the thing being done.

Now that you’ve re-arranged your sentence, all you need to do is replace “I” with a subject that fits the original intent of the passive sentence you started with.

What if the subject isn’t present or obvious?

Like we pointed out with Apple’s app above, the first thing in the sentence isn’t automatically the subject. The subject is specifically the thing doing the thing, and might not always be present.

This is a passive sentence.

“Mistakes” is not the subject, because they’re being made, they’re not making themselves. Someone or something has to make the mistakes.

The subject is the thing that does the thing. So where is it in this sentence?

It’s hiding. You have to add it back in.

Forcing “I” into the sentence as the subject isn’t going to solve every instance of passive voice.

The more complex a sentence is, the harder it’s going to be to identify passive voice, and like we said, there are some cases where passive voice isn’t only acceptable, but preferred.

But most uses of passive voice in copywriting don’t fit those criteria and are the result of bad style.

Slouching.

Your copy will read much more smoothly if you eliminate casual uses of passive voice as much as you can.

If you have trouble spotting passive voice, don’t worry. It takes practice. And you don’t need to spend hours rewriting every sentence to make a 100% active piece of copy.

Just be mindful of casual uses of passive voice and eliminate them. You’ll have stronger, more succinct copy that makes your readers, and thus Google, happy.

Pro Tip: You can also use apps like readable.io or the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to score your readability.

But bad style will still frustrate those users and cause them to bounce for a competitor of yours, and that will hurt your SEO. So you owe it to yourself to drop the passive writing regardless.

This hack is our gift to you, so give it a try and let us know what you think of it. If you’re a writer yourself, eliminating passive voice will help you stand apart from your competition.

If you don’t consider yourself a writer but are responsible for your company’s blog, then this trick will help you look like the real deal. Good luck!

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