Active voice or appealing to your reader - what's your priority?

Anyone who writes reports, stories, articles, papers will often refer back to their classroom grammar rules (or Grammar Girl) to ensure they use an active voice. For those occasions where you might slip into passive voice, there's often someone nearby to request an edit. If you've ever needed to review the SEO of your website, you'll also know the importance of using an active voice.

However, writers of every style also know that sometimes you have to position your argument in a compelling way or need to quickly catch the eye of your reader. In these situations, an active voice might not be your best option.

Picture this, a government program review is well-researched, beautifully written, easy to read and understand, informative, accessible, inclusive and elegantly designed. That's a win! Unfortunately, the reader is overwhelmed (and bored) by reading over and over how the Department of Excellent Work took action which resulted in wonderful outcomes for specific groups of people (active voice rule: actor does something to/for the receiver). No one wants to read that!

Wouldn't it be more interesting, and exciting, if the report spoke about the outcome that was achieved or who benefited - at the beginning of the sentence? For example, talking about smaller class sizes being delivered by the Department of Excellent Work and their Very Interesting Minister (refer to a separate post on my views on the overuse of capital letters!). Or even that teachers and children will benefit from this work being done by the Department and Fabulous Minister. That would be much more interesting and much more value to the community.

Of course, we could always ignore the subject (actor) altogether and just say that smaller class sizes are being delivered to benefit teachers and children and not even mention the Department or their Minister but not sure they'd be happy with being left out...

For those who are not yet convinced, need to improve their SEO or just can't remember their classroom grammar on this one, here's a useful article from Yoast explaining active voice and the benefits.

For everyone else, please continue to use a passive voice when the actor should live at the end of the sentence!

Image courtesy of Sofia Lopez Olalde via Pixabay