“What do you want for dinner?”
“Whatever.”
“Hotdogs okay?”
“Fine.”
Chances are, you read aggression in the voice of one or more of the above characters, and chances are, also, that you’ve been a party to such a conversation yourself, and in that moment thought, “(S)he is obviously upset, and not saying so. I wish (s)he would just tell me what the problem is, already!”
Just like no one likes passive aggressive behavior, very few readers can get down with a work that is loaded up with passive voice. Often, the trick to eliminating passive voice from your writing is identifying it in the first place, because it isn’t always as obvious as an attitude being flung at you by your spouse or your teenager.
Join us on the Christian Indie Writers’ Podcast this week as we discuss how to identify passive voice in your writing, how to fix it, and if it is ever a good idea to just leave it alone.
See you there,
Jamie
