Sin #1: Passive Voice

Adopting the Passive Voice

Take a moment to read the following paragraph, from a real business school application essay:

There is good reason why I want to transition to money management. My current and prior roles are all reactive to investment managers’ decisions. The investment side requires a higher degree of thinking and the ability to be forward looking and the ability to accurately predict the future. They need to constantly be up to date with current events and be aware of everything that is going on around them. For example, earlier last year there was an earthquake in China that devastated Wenchuan County. The province that was hit hardest, Sichuan, was a large agricultural producer. As an investment manager, you need to be forward thinking of the effects that this earthquake has on the rest of the world, and specifically in the investments you own and don’t own.

The applicant gets his point across, but it's tiresome.

Now read the following paragraph, which conveys much the same information:

I want to transition to money management because, in my current role, I merely react to investment managers’ decisions, rather than thinking ahead and predicting the future myself. As in investment manager, I’ll need to update myself constantly on current events. For example, an earthquake last year in China devastated Sichuan province, a large natural gas producer. As an investment manager, I would need to predict the effects this would have on the rest of the world, specifically on the investments in my portfolio.

What’s the difference? Passive voice versus action verbs! The first paragraph over-relies on the passive verb “to be” whereas the second uses dynamic verbs, often called “action verbs.” In a good, strong, action-verb-filled paragraph, you can almost get the sense of the paragraph by reading the verbs alone.

Let’s go back to the original, unedited version and highlight every appearance of the verb “to be”:

There is good reason why I want to transition to money management. My current and prior roles are all reactive to investment managers’ decisions. The investment side requires a higher degree of thinking and the ability to be forward looking and I’ll even go as far as saying that investment managers need the ability to accurately predict the future. They need to constantly be up to date with current events and be aware of everything that is going on around them. For example, earlier last year there was an earthquake in China that devastated Wenchuan County. The province that was hit hardest, Sichuan, was a large natural gas producer. As an investment manager, you need to be forward thinking of the effects that this earthquake has on the rest of the world, and specifically in the investments you own and don’t own.

The paragraph looks like a bad case of acne! Notice how many extraneous words we chopped simply by switching from passive voice—is, are, was, to be—to active voice: want, react, devastated, predict. The passive voice encourages you to use more words than you really need; it tempts you into verbosity. And verbosity will put your reader to sleep.

To get the passive voice out of your system, try this exercise: take a simple declarative sentence, and gradually torture it into the most convoluted and passive atrocity you possibly can. Here’s an example:

1. Write a paragraph using the passive voice.

Clear enough. Now let’s make it passive:

2. A paragraph should be written by you, using the passive voice.

Bad, but we can do worse. Let’s get even more passive:

3. The passive voice should be used in a paragraph written by you.

Notice how the subject, you, comes at the end of the line? Also notice how the same thought requires more and more words to express, as we get more and more passive. Each succeeding sentence gets longer and longer. But we’re not done yet! Let’s see just how atrociously passive we can get:

4. A voice, which should be passive, should be used, in a paragraph written by you.

Sickening, isn’t it?