Writing with passive voice can often seem dull and less engaging. While there are moments when passive voice is acceptable, it can be confusing and weaken your writing. Fortunately, Grammarly is a useful tool that identifies and corrects passive voice errors. In this article, we’ll explain how Grammarly can help you enhance your writing by steering clear of passive voice.
Steps on Correcting the Use of Passive Voice with Grammarly
Step 1: Understanding Passive Voice
To write clearly, you should know about passive voice. This happens when the sentence focuses on the action’s receiver. It can confuse the reader since it doesn’t clearly show the doer. For example, “The book is read by him” uses passive voice, but “He reads a book” is active. To keep your writing clear and simple, try to avoid using passive voice.
Step 2: Identifying Passive Voice with Grammarly
Grammarly offers a tool that helps you avoid passive voice in writing. This matters because passive voice can make writing unclear and complex. Grammarly examines your text, highlights passive voice sentences, and suggests improvements. This is useful if you struggle to spot or correct passive voice.
Step 3: Utilizing Grammarly’s Suggestions
When Grammarly spots passive voice in what you’ve written, it offers ways to change those sentences to active voice. Usually, these tips involve changing the sentence to focus on who is doing the action instead of who is receiving it. By using Grammarly’s advice, you can turn passive sentences into active ones, making your writing clearer and easier to read.
Step 4: Manual Review and Contextual Considerations
While Grammarly’s tips are useful, it’s important to check each passive voice suggestion yourself. This way, you can be sure the changes fit what you mean and the context. Passive voice isn’t always wrong, especially in formal writing where you might want to focus on who gets the action. By thinking about what you’re writing, you can decide if you should take Grammarly’s advice or keep the passive voice if it suits your message.
Step 5: Learning from Corrections
Using Grammarly offers a great chance to learn from errors like passive voice misuse. By looking at and accepting Grammarly’s tips, you understand better how passive voice affects your writing and ways to steer clear of it later. With time, this can boost your writing skills, helping you create more powerful and interesting content.
Conclusion
When crafting a piece, thinking about who will read it matters. Different folks need different details. To keep your writing sharp and clear, Grammarly offers a tool to spot passive voice slips. By checking Grammarly’s tips, you can switch passive lines to active ones, making them hit home with your audience. This boosts your writing style and how you communicate. Writing with active voice packs a punch, and Grammarly guides you to nail it.
FAQs
1. What is passive voice, and why is it considered a problem in writing?
When the subject of a sentence receives the action instead of doing it, that’s passive voice. This style can make writing less clear and direct, making it harder to understand. That’s why people often avoid it in academic and professional texts.
2. What are some common indicators of passive voice that Grammarly detects?
Grammarly often points out passive voice in sentences using forms of “to be” like is, are, was, and were, paired with a past participle such as written, seen, or discussed, especially when the subject doing the action isn’t clear.
3. Can Grammarly distinguish between intentional and unintentional use of passive voice?
Grammarly’s system spots passive voice no matter the context. Even if passive voice fits in some cases, Grammarly wants to keep writing clear and easy to understand, so it flags passive sentences for users to check.
4. Is it always necessary to fix passive voice when Grammarly detects it?
Grammarly helps make writing clearer by suggesting active voice instead of passive. You can choose to follow these tips if they fit your style and audience.