Make your writing legible
The first writing rule might be “show, don’t tell”, but the second is surely “use active verbs”. Almost all the books I have on writing emphasize the use of the active voice over the passive voice. Read on to discover the difference.
Verbs have two voices, active or passive. When you use the active voice, the subject performs the action and the verb expresses the action. For example, Gail opened the book. The subject is Gail, the verb opens and the object is book.
When you use the passive voice, the subject becomes the passive recipient of the action. For example: Gail opened the book. The passive voice will have a “double verb”, a form of the verb “to be” and the past participle of another verb, which often ends in “ed” as in “opened”. Generic verbs like – is, are, were, was, be, being, been, be, had and have – don’t convey much and the passive voice can make a sentence confusing. The active voice is short, direct, and easier to understand.
Sometimes it is okay to use the passive voice, such as when the reader does not need to know who performed the action. Example: the building was built hundreds of years ago. The author of the action is unknown or unimportant.
If you look for the ways to “be”, you can see where you are using the passive voice. Microsoft Word 2003 provides an easy way to check readability and passive voice. Just go to the Tools menu and click Options, then click the Spelling and Grammar tab. Select the check box for Check grammar with spelling. Also select the Show readability statistics box. Click OK. Highlight the document you want to verify. Click the abc icon on the toolbar, press F7 or go to Tools and click Spelling and Grammar. Word will check your highlighted document and then display information about the reading level.
You will get a chart showing the count of words, characters, paragraphs and sentences. It will also display averages of sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, and characters per word. In the readability section, there are three useful statistics. First the percentage of passive sentences is displayed: the closer to zero you get, the better. Next is the Flesch Reading Ease score, which is scored on a 100 point scale. The higher your score, the easier your writing will be to read. The last one is the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. You qualify at the US grade level. If you score a 7, then a seventh grader will understand your writing.
This is just a tool and there is much more that is needed to write well. But it can provide useful information that will help you improve what you have written.