Writing a Non-fiction Book

[girlbarber]

I need help. I'm writing about my high school years. I am a junior in high school. How am I supposed to write it? In passive or in active? I don't even really know what that means? Help me.

[Al B]

In simple terms, the difference between active and passive can be regarded as how you use tense (so principally, the verbs change), which has quite a dramatic effect on how you relate your tale.

However, it isn't always the verbs which change, generally, it's the order in which the protagonists appear in the sentence which changes too, and this has a huge bearing on how things read in terms of interest. So in the active style: the soldier shot the terrorist, whereas in passive: the terrorist was shot by the soldier. In that example, you can see that the active style places the soldier at the start of the sentence. Clearly this is preferable, since the soldier is the one doing stuff, the one who is left alive, and therefore presumably the focus of the thing.

Another example would be, active: I am writing to inform you about our special offer... as opposed to, passive: I wanted to write to you, to inform you about our special offer...

You can see that the main difference in that example, is the sense of immediacy, the active examples are more 'in the moment', as though you are witnessing the event as it happens, and it seems you are being spoken to personally. Passive tends to be a bit dowdy, impersonal and somewhat formal by comparison.

This is why active is preferable for most writing, and is certainly the best choice for marketing, amongst other things - you always see active voicing in advertising copy.

So why would you use passive voice when it seems active has all the advantages? Well, perhaps you want your writing to seem formal. English students 'in the know' often use passive to cheat a bit on writing exercises too incidentally. You can see in the above examples that the word count is invariably higher in passive voice, so if you've been given an assignment to write 500 words on something, passive helps you get through the thing with minimal ideas! Try that on an English degree dissertation however, and the examiners will know what you are up to though, so be warned.

Al

[Maeve]

As the grammar guru, I have to butt in here.


Another example would be, active: I am writing to inform you about our special offer... as opposed to, passive: I wanted to write to you, to inform you about our special offer...

The first example (I am writing to inform you about our special offer...)

is in active voice.

The second example (I wanted to write to you,to inform you about our special offer...) is also in active voice.

The only difference between these two sentences is that the first one is in present continuous tense and the second is in simple past tense. Both are in active voice because the subject is the doer of the action.

Passive voice occurs when the direct object of an action becomes the subject of the sentence, as in the soldier/terrorist examples.

Watch for more on this in DWT's Grammar 101 series.

[Al B]

Yup, my mistake on the second one Maeve, I was thinking of tense shifts because I'd mentioned it in the bit before - oops. That's what you get when you write stuff when tired! Carry on!

Al