- Want to lose your reader,
bore them to tears,
or make them question everything you write?
Of course not.
That's why you need to stop using passive voice
in your writing today.
If you want to make your nonfiction book the best it can be,
this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey, there I'm Julie the Book Broad, from Book Launchers.
We're your professional self-publishing team,
helping you write, publish, and promote a nonfiction book
that will help you have a huge impact on your readers,
and done right, will also help you grow your brand,
build your business, and make you money.
The best part, you keep all rights and royalties.
Say it with me.
Passive voice is the enemy of good writing.
You want your book to have an impact on your reader, right?
That's why you have to stop using passive voice.
The reason passive voice is so deadly
is that it's grammatically correct.
Even if you hire an editor,
you may still find your book riddled with it.
That's why it's up to you to eradicate it from your writing.
Passive voice is general.
And in many ways it feels safer to write in passive voice
because it leaves out information
that could get you in trouble,
but this is why it matters so much.
It leaves out the information that people care about,
and that makes your writing interesting.
Because passive voice is grammatically correct,
you may still think it's okay to use sometimes,
but let me tell you, even if it's right,
it's boring. (yawning)
I find many authors use it
when they're afraid to name names,
or they're worried about taking a stance.
For example, they were cutting back for unknown reasons.
That is grammatically correct,
and maybe you're thinking you need to say that
because you don't know the reasons or exactly who they are,
but let's try and rewrite it in a more active way.
The decision to cut staff, remove benefits
and stop all travel came from
the top management of the company.
Or you could say, someone at the top decided 20% of expenses
had to get cut starting immediately.
Or someone with power in the company
made the decision that, dot dot dot.
Each example explains who did it,
even if you don't know who specifically.
And really it just gives more details,
and that's my secret for fixing passive voice.
I add details.
Now, before we hit on how to fix it in other ways,
let's quickly cover how you can spot it in your writing.
Basically you have to look at what happened
and look at who was responsible for doing it.
If there isn't a person identified
or they're mentioned after the thing that happened,
you likely are looking at a passive voice sentence.
For example, the door was slammed
versus saying, the angry teenager slammed the door.
So I know when I was an angry teenager
and I slammed my door a few too many times,
my mom actually came into my room and took the door off.
You can also try and read the sentence out loud
to see if it's passive voice.
We rarely speak in passive voice.
So if it doesn't sound like something you would ever say
reword it, cause it could be passive voice.
The simplest advice I can give you
is to just look for places where you've been general
and then to fix passive voice,
change it to be specific,
and speak directly to your reader,
taking ownership of your opinions,
your experiences, and your advice.
When you do that, you'll find you naturally
get rid of most of your passive voice.
And as a result, your readers will be so much more engaged.
So let's go through just a couple of examples
so we can be sure that you've got the hang of this.
Here's what I see all the time.
And if you're writing a book with research in it,
you might be guilty of this one.
So just pay attention to this.
You've done research,
and let's say you've discovered that sugar,
something about sugar.
Sugar was discovered to speed up the tumor growth
in 40% of the patients.
The sentence seems harmless, but again,
harmless is not interesting or engaging.
And in fact, you may be writing that
to avoid actually taking a stand.
We don't want to be harmless.
We want to be impactful.
That's a made up sentence by the way,
but now let's make up some alternatives.
Stop, what are you eating or drinking while you read this?
Does it have sugar in it?
If you have a tumor, that very thing you're about to consume
could make that tumor grow faster.
Maybe you should put that pumpkin spice latte down
and rethink your sugar intake
because 40% of tumors were found
in a study by Harvard researchers
to grow faster when fed sugar.
Or you could say that sugar in your coffee every day,
may seem harmless, but if you have a tumor,
you could be causing it to grow faster.
That's what researchers at Harvard University discovered
to be true in 40% of their cases.
Just speak directly to the reader,
tell them what you know, they need to hear.
And if you're talking about yourself,
and the disaster your life became,
or some mistake you made,
for goodness sakes, take responsibility.
Here's a real estate example.
Tenants started to complain.
Rent was paid late.
Property managers were not filing the paperwork right.
Let's be real.
It's not the tenant's fault or the property manager's fault.
It's your real estate business.
It's your responsibility, so you need to own what you did
and share it so people can learn from it.
Remember when you're writing a book that you want to sell,
you have one goal, and that is to impact the reader
and deliver on that hook of your book
when you're doing that.
Now, when you're writing your book in your first draft,
if you catch yourself using passive voice, great,
you know, it's a good idea to quickly try
and add a few details to fix it,
but please don't try to endlessly edit yourself as you go.
Passive voice can be hard to spot sometimes.
And my mission here is not for you to struggle
to write your book,
it's to help you know the difference
between passive and active voice,
so when you're editing your draft,
you can turn it into active voice
to make it more interesting for your readers.
Whew! (laughing)
Do you have passive voice tips?
Let's chat about it in the comments below,
and on your way to comments,
smash that thumbs up button.
Go ahead, try it, it feels so good.
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