Passive voice

And they all kind of generally say the same stuff.

You know, keep related words together, try to prefer the short, avoid passive voice, all that stuff.

What do you mean keep related words together? What does that mean? Well, we'll talk about that during the podcast at some point.

but all of them kind of say the same stuff, but do a bad job of explaining why.

Why these things? Why do these things work and not other things? And what happens if you're trying to do something else semantically? What if you have a different goal for your specific piece of writing that doesn't quite fit this? Like, for example, the prefer the active to the passive voice, but When? When should I not prefer the active? Is there any time that the passive is appropriate? And I think we did talk about, we got an email about it from a very astute listener.

For our listeners

at home, can you give examples of active and passive voice? We're

going to get

But I have some great examples of that and reasons why.

And then also bringing the passive voice back to where it is useful.

It is useful in many instances and beautiful examples of that.

Adverbs, how we can use verbs to show and not tell.

Okay.

Is there any other relatively simple exercise that you would recommend for writers to try if they're like, I'm going to revise my verbs? What should I do?

This will sound very basic, but really one key thing is to look at where you're using the passive voice.

Hmm.

And back when AI first started, it would do this thing where it would say, "Without the fluff," which was always really funny to me because there's so much fluffness in AI copy where it's like rather than saying, like, "Get what you actually want," you can just say, "Get what you want," and just, like, really lean into that.

It's not passive voice.

You get to sound stronger when you get rid of these really vague words.

Another vague word, and this isn't necessarily an AI thing as much as it is just a human thing that shows up sometimes in AI is calling something a game changer.

So you can have me, my thoughts, my help, my editing, my genuine context on your copy all year long starting in January.

So make sure you get on the wait list now.

What other AI tells have I been seeing pop up a heck of a lot? Passive voice.

We need to talk about passive voice because I will see it say things where it's just, again, hedging your authority, where it says, "This can help a lot of people achieve their goals," versus saying, "I will help you achieve your money goals." It's not being specific.