How often do you say: “I was going to do …”, or “I had driven …”, or “I have been thinking …?

We all know the difference between active and passive voice: the active voice would say “I did”, or “I drove”, or “I think“.  The passive voice softens the impact of the message with variations of had/has/have or forms of the verb “to be”.  They both work, but the active voice is more powerful and generally preferred.  And yet, we continue to use the passive voice – a lot!  There are three main problems with the passive voice: it doesn’t have much energy, it can create a trace of confusion in the listener’s/reader’s mind until the remainder of the thought is completed, and it is wordy.

First, when we are trying to communicate a message, we want to sustain as much energy as possible to help ensure our audience stays with us and hears us.  There is a different energy level between the two statements: “I drove to New York for the conference” and “I was driving to New York for the conference.”   Say the two statements aloud and you can feel the difference.  Higher energy helps us keep our audience engaged.

In addition to lowering the energy of the message, there is often a short period of confusion as to where you are headed.  When we use the active voice, “I retired from ABC Company in 2005”, we are stating a fact.  The relevance will quickly (hopefully) become apparent.  When we use the passive voice, “I had retired from ABC Company in 2005 …”, the audience may be waiting for a “but” or some indication you went back to work.  It may take the audience longer to catch up to your message instead of keeping them engaged throughout.

Finally, extra words require extra time.  These days, people have a shorter attention span and less time for many conversations, and extra words can lose the audience.  Get to the point.

There are times, of course, when we do want to use a passive voice.  For example, it is softer and may help us break through resistance.  It can also be an effective lead to a story: if we want to talk about something that happened while we were driving to New York, we might want to lead into the story by saying “I was driving to New York when …”  Passive voice isn’t bad, it is simply over-used.

If you want to see how often you use active vs. passive voices, look at something you wrote.  If half your verbs are passive, you might want to work at reducing the numbers.  Look at how you might change the wording to be clearer and more active.

 Remember … it’s all in how you say it!