Editing for Passive Voice

Editing for Passive Voice by Ross Martinek

Use the table below to find passive voice in your work. If you do this exercise for ten chapters, you will find yourself spotting and eliminating passive voice as you write. The instructions are for MS Word 2011 (2010 on Windows, IIRC), but should be similar in earlier versions. I use this and it works. I wrote scientific works for over forty years, where passive voice is nearly required, rather than tolerated.

The definition of passive voice (from grammardivas.com, an excellent grammar reference site):

“A passive voice sentence will always have:

1.  a form of “to be” + past participle for the verb (was called, will be thrown)

2.  subject of the sentence receives action rather than doing the action

3.  doer of action (if stated) is in a prepositional phrase beginning with by (or to).”

Memorizing this will help, but the instructions below work better.

Target words for passive voice	Chapter
	11	22	33	44	55	66	77	88	99	110
had/have/was/ were/been/be/by/to /could/would/should/

Turn off Track Changes

Open Advanced Find

Type target word (one at a time) in search box

Select “Find whole words”

Select “Highlight all items”

Click Find

Click Title Bar of document.

Click highlight color (something you can read through)

Repeat as desired.

Turn on Track Changes

Edit and review

Turn off Track Changes

Advanced Find: Clear find box and any other search criteria check boxes

Select Highlight under the Format drop down

Select Highlight all items

Click find

Click Title Bar of Document

Select None in the highlight color dropdown menu.

*The MS Word grammar checker is essentially useless except for three things: passive voice, cliché, and colloquialisms. After you think you’ve found all the passive voice in your document, try the following.

Open Word Preferences.

Click on Spelling and Grammar

In the Grammar section, clear all check boxes except “Show readability statistics.”

In the Grammar section, click on the pull down for Writing style and select “Custom.”

Click the “Settings…” button next to that pull down.

Clear all check boxes except “Passive sentences,” “Clichés,” “Colloquialisms,” and “Sentence length.”

Click the “Okay” button to close the dialog.

NOTE: If you have previously checked either grammar or spelling, you must click the “Recheck Document” button or Word will ignore everything you want it to find! You must do this every time you want to check the document for these things.

Click the “Okay” button to close the preferences window.

Turn on “Track changes” and have at it.

Remember that not all passive sentences are bad. Sometimes they are necessary. More often, they are not.

Mentor Monday: Language Evolves and Grammar Lurches Along: On Keeping a Toehold on Stampeding Style, By RJ Robertson

Welcome to Mentor Monday, our second and fourth Monday feature focusing on the how-to's of writing. Today we have another installment in a series from our beloved Curmudgeon of Grammar, RJ Robertson. To refresh your memory, check out Part One. Enjoy!

Language Evolves and Grammar Lurches Along: On Keeping a Toehold on Stampeding Style
by RJ Robertson, Curmudgeon of Grammar

Part One, cont.

Well, enough of excuses and allusions. My discussion is in four parts. In the first I will detail ten of the commonest errors one encounters in everyday speech and writing. It is in the form of a quiz. If you get all or most correct, you might be satisfied to go your way in peace. Or, even if you don’t, you could simply resolve not to do it again, and still go your way in peace. If you endure to the second part, I will present the rationale for the correct choices in common sense terms. In the third part I will say a bit about the parts of language, and how they require the currently-reigning rules. (Heaven knows I’m no expert at it, but I do have the basics, and we’ll muddle through.) Finally, in the fourth part I will reverse course and propose that, if you hang around long enough, many of the things I criticize (following Strunk and White) will be common practice. Off we go, then.

Mentor Monday: Language Evolves and Grammar Lurches Along: On Keeping a Toehold on Stampeding Style (Part 1), by RJ Robertson

Welcome to our new feature, Mentor Monday. Every second and fourth Monday, we will feature helpful articles on all aspects of writing, from the craft of writing to the business of being an author. This week, we feature regular ShopNotes contributor RJ Robertson and his four-part series on grammar. Enjoy!

Language Evolves and Grammar Lurches Along: On Keeping a Toehold on Stampeding Style, Part 1
by R.J. Robertson

"Many years ago a wise and cynical man proved that the way a person talks is the most important thing about him." -Robert A. Heinlein, in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Foreword:
I got this job because – having been educated before the era of “don’t inhibit a child’s self-expression” – I thrust myself unwittingly into the role of Curmudgeon of Grammar in the Evanston Writers’ Workshop.

The C of G is not exactly a knightly title, you understand, but it does have one faintly noble perquisite: you get to criticize the work of writers better than yourself. I populated this role, without realizing what I was doing, by complaining about too many liberties being taken with English grammar in otherwise excellent work submitted for critique in the Evanston Writers’ group.