Powerful Writing – How to Use Active Voice in Business Communication

Voice can make an important statement. Expert communicators understand when to employ active or passive voice for maximum impact or authority respectively.

Active voice highlights the person performing an action (the subject). Passive voice, in contrast, leaves out this actor (the subject), creating more wordy and difficult-to-read sentences.

How to Use Active Voice

Writers should employ active voice whenever possible; it’s more grammatically correct and often clearer than passive constructions, typically featuring shorter sentences that are direct and engaging for their readership.

Clarity is essential to effective business communication. Passive constructions may cloud the writer’s intent and make it more challenging for readers to grasp; this may especially be true of non-native speakers.

Active voice writing emphasizes who performs an action, making it more clear for readers. Furthermore, this writing style makes the sentence more easily understood by them.

Passive constructions may be appropriate in certain circumstances, though generally speaking they should be avoided whenever possible. Passive voice may be particularly effective for technical writing or when you wish to emphasize the effects of an action taken by others; legal documents often use passive constructions; otherwise active voice is typically preferred.

1. Put the Subject First

Active voice is usually preferred when writing business articles; however, in certain instances passive voice may be necessary when conveying technical and scientific content.

Good writing is clear and direct, reducing the chance of misinterpretations by colleagues, clients, or other stakeholders. Furthermore, good writing makes you sound confident – inspiring confidence in others compared to passive voice that may sound uncertain or uncertain.

To avoid passive sentences’ awkward, unnatural feeling, it is better to remove prepositions like “the gate was crashed through” or “the robber was chased”. Instead, identify who performs the action denoted by verb in the sentence: For instance: The Tigers beat out the Lions whose new strategy seems effective.

Subject-verb agreement in writing can make for clear and efficient sentences; when writing passive sentences however, their subject becomes the coffee being sipped instead, creating lengthy, wordy and potentially confusing paragraphs. As always, knowing who your actor is can make your writing even stronger!

2. Make Your Sentences Shorter

Writing in active voice means using subjects as agents for verbs in your sentences to create an immediate, direct tone in the writing. Active voice writing should generally be employed when conveying clear and direct information regarding any given topic or discussion point.

Be mindful that clarity should never be mistaken for brevity. Too short sentences could fail to convey their intended message and could confuse readers instead.

To keep sentences short, look for words that do not add any additional meaning, eliminate unneeded conjunctions and prepositional phrases, remove excessive commas and any extra information inserted between commas to shorten sentences and keep reading easy.

3. Use Active Verbs

Relying on powerful verbs to write clearly is vital, but that shouldn’t be your only consideration when attempting to make your sentences more powerful. Pay close attention to where the action is taking place in each sentence as well.

As part of passive voice, many sentences often obfuscate who or what performs an action by using prepositional phrases like, “was visited,” “was cleaned,” or “will be built”. This allows us to divert responsibility while creating uncertainty.

Passive sentences tend to be longer, less direct and may leave readers feeling detached from what’s happening around them. To prevent this, we should employ active verbs whenever possible – for instance in this sentence: Rogers conducted a study on nursing and turnover.” The active voice presents Rogers performing the action instead of it being performed upon Rogers (which would change its emphasis), whereas in passive construction action is performed upon another subject (here company). Changing this sentence to active voice: “The survey instrument will be administered by school administrators”.

4. Avoid Passive Verbs

Business writers need to convey messages clearly and directly, in order to reduce the chances that colleagues or clients misinterpret your writing.

To achieve this, it is critical that your business writing avoid using passive verbs. Passive sentences can be confusing and hard to follow, and often waste words by creating prepositional phrases with too many prepositions attached together.

Though active voice is generally preferable for business writing, sometimes passive construction may be appropriate. For example, this makes sense when identifying who performed an action or when its identity is irrelevant to its meaning.

Look through each example and identify who performed each action denoted by each verb in each sentence, replacing passive constructions with active verbs to train yourself on how to quickly identify passive sentences and use active forms more often. Good luck and thank you!