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Improve your writing by avoiding these two bad habits

ZCorp PRDigital • May 20, 2020

Are passive voice and protracted sentences making your content less readable?

OK, so you’re getting set to write a blog post for your business. I’m assuming you already know the basics of English grammar, punctuation and spelling (or at least have a spell checker). You’re ready to go. Still, you’re concerned about the quality. You don’t want your content to have a clunky, amateurish feel.

Sometimes it helps to know what not to do. Here are two pitfalls, common “worst practices” that can make your content less readable. Stay away from them and you’ll improve your writing significantly.

First, avoid passive voice. This type of writing is probably more common than the clouds in the sky, unfortunately. Instead of your sentence containing a doer, there’s a being-done-to entity receiving an action, often from an unknown subject. I know that sounds confusing, so here’s an example:

Passive: County Commissioner Mike Smith was called a liar during Wednesday’s special meeting.

Active: Tom Johnson, a local developer, called County Commissioner Mike Smith a liar during Wednesday’s special meeting.

Note that there’s no doer in the passive sentence. Someone is calling Mike Smith a liar but we don’t know who. Often, passive voice papers over the fact that the writer doesn’t have all the particulars for his or her readers.

Here’s another example of passive vs. active voice (it seems emotions are escalating at the county commission meeting):

Passive: Johnson was then punched in the face by the commissioner.

Active: The commissioner then punched Johnson in the face.

In the passive example, we know who’s doing what. But there’s no verb attached to a doer. It’s bad writing because it doesn’t create a clear mental picture. There’s no vividness. When you read the sentence, “The commissioner then punched Johnson in the face,” you get a sharper image of the haymaker landing than you do in the colorless passive example.

Now, if we really wanted to get passive-crazy, we could follow up with this:

The floor was fallen on by Johnson.

OK, few people would write a sentence like that. Most would go for the active voice here: Johnson fell on the floor. But you get the message.

Second, avoid wordy, overly long sentences. This is another common writing sin. For some reason, people seem afraid to craft short, to-the-point sentences. Maybe it sounds too “clipped” to them. And of course, it’s good for the cadence and flow if a writer mixes shorter- and medium-length sentences. But short ones are perfectly fine to sprinkle liberally into your content.

Still, there appears to be a psychological resistance to brevity that leads to sentences like this:

The XYZ Company has provided customers with an outstanding array of products for the past 22 years and has won many awards for innovation and has been an industry leader during its entire history, making customer satisfaction and quality our top priorities.

This 42-word gulp begs the question: Why on earth do we need the word “and” inserted so many times to paste together independent clauses? Why can’t the clauses stand on their own as distinct sentences? This is much better:

The XYZ Company has provided customers with an outstanding array of products for the past 22 years. The company has won many awards for innovation and has been an industry leader during its entire history. We make customer satisfaction and quality our top priorities.

Three sentences now take the place of that one, long freight train of verbiage. It’s a good practice whenever you type “and” to ask yourself whether you’re gluing together clauses that might sound better as separate sentences. Often, that’s the case.

There you have it: two improvements that can vastly upgrade one’s content quality. Passive voice and protracted sentences are just bad habits anyone can break. All it requires is a little mindfulness.

Now, go and write some great content.

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