“A soccer camp was hosted by the youth group.”

“The youth group hosted a soccer camp.”

If you look at the two sentences there, the first one is called “passive voice” sentence construction. That’s because the “thing” — a soccer camp — is stealing all the glory from the people in the sentence due to its position at the front.

The soccer camp didn’t DO anything. It is a passive participant of this sentence. It’s the youth group who are doing something — hosting the camp. Yet, the way the first sentence is constructed, the soccer camp gets all the attention and the youth group is kind of an afterthought.

This sentence structure is a common form of writing for beginning writers. The problem? It saps all the power and energy out of sentence. You know how on a sizzling, hot summer day you just have no motivation to do anything? Humidity hangs heavy over the landscape and you feel slow and tired. That’s what passive sentences do to a paragraph and a story.

The second sentence is constructed in “active voice.” It’s bouncy, lively, full of energy. The youth group is the headliner, and they’re doing something–they’re hosting a soccer camp. You can almost hear distant shouts and screams floating to you from the soccer field, a thump as soccer balls bounce off knees and foreheads, the crowd cheering as someone scores a goal.

We want our writing to hold this same energy and power. You can get halfway there through active sentences, in which the people or objects actually doing an action (people cheering, a soccer ball bouncing off knees and foreheads) are put at the front of the sentence and the thing that they’re doing comes later.

Here’s some more reading on active vs. passive voice.

Tags: active, Mission Magazine, passive, voice, writing