Do you use the passive voice in your business emails? Stop Today.

Use the active voice when writing an email for business. Always. Nobody you correspond with wants to hear "mistakes were made." By whom? How? Who is in charge? When did the mistake happen? Who is accountable? The passive voice will kill your ability to persuade and drive trust in an organization or a relationship.

In the active voice, the subject is doing the acting. With the passive voice, the subject is being acted upon. Passive voice often results in sentences that are longer and more vague than is ideal. More importantly, high powered clients and good bosses have zero tolerance for the passive voice where there is generalized blame, generalized date horizons, and generalized next steps. Let's look at a classic example in a services business:

Passive: "The current status report has been attached, please let us know if you have any questions?"

Active: I have attached the current status report, and I highlighted the important figures that vary by more than 20% off forecast.

But, where the active voice becomes incredibly important is when things go wrong and its time to take responsibility. Like everyone, clients and business partners relish straightforward conversation and speech patterns. Let's look at another classic example when something has gone wrong:

Passive: “An error has been made and we are very sorry”

Active: “Our team made an error. The cost implication is $12,000. We will format a plan to rebate that money by January 12th. Thank you for your patience and we are sorry.” 

You can see the difference in tone, tense, accountability and specifics in the above.

While we are at it, and to underscore the point, if you truly want to irritate your team, your boss, or your client, here is the hall-of-fame of worst, most passive voice offenders:

Hall of Shame (worst passive voice examples): 1) "Mistakes were made" 2) "Budget was overspent" 3) "The meeting was messy" 4) "The pilot could have gone better 5) "Certain people on that team never get along"

If you eliminate this and focus on the detailed and more active voice and use $1 words instead of $50 words, you will find better responses to your emails. I promise. I mean, I could be wrong...and in that case, well...mistakes were made (see what I did there:)

See you next Friday morning. Please share this with someone else so they can join the near 40,000 folks who are part of this Great Client Partnerships community. Subscribing is easy, and free. Just press subscribe.

Jared