Writing Shittily

Paul Ford has created a bookmarklet that flags adverbs and passive sentence construction. I hesitate to even mention it here, because running it on this site is, to be honest, embarassing.

Passive voice was never stressed as a thing to avoid when I was learning to write, and I didn’t even know what it was up until a year and a half ago. Still, knowing that I wrote about it here and then disregarded it upsets me.

A couple weeks ago in my television class, Dr. Leidholdt gave a long-ish lecture on writing well, and he spent a good ten minutes on passive voice. “Use verbs to move your sentence along,” he said (and wrote a few times on my annotated bibliography). I get the feeling that ensuring that I use active voice will have an immediate positive impact on my writing; I just need to try to be more consicous of it.

Also: When is the passive voice appropriate?

March 27, 2004 - 09:19 AM