My heavy eyelids dropped involuntarily until I forced them back open. After some analysis of the characters and setting, you should formulate a strong sentence that grabs the reader in a way that puts them in the story: Just changing the sentence to be active doesn't make it a good sentence:įeeling tired, sleepiness overwhelmed me.īoth these have active verbs but they are both still weak sentences. Here is an example where I discuss that a sentence can be weak even after changing it from passive to active voice. Now that your story is out, fix the weak sentences in a revision. Weak sentences are great for writing time! Just finishing a novel is a lot of work and if you need to use weak sentences to get your story out, do it. ![]() Weak sentences are only bad at release time, though. ![]() The problem is really "weak sentences." It just so happens that 90+% of the time that you find a passive voice sentence it is also a weak sentence. A passive voice sentence is usually extremely boring. But your readers will usually put down a book filled with passive voice. I find myself in need of advice from those who actually have experience. (See: The "Rules" of Writing) Even if I just stop and start blasting out volumes of text, I might later blindly follow every voice suggestion to my detriment. I worry that I'm spending too much time agonizing over voice, when I should be spending more time just writing. Therein lies the real question: How peevish are editors about the use of passive voice in fiction, really? I've found that I have gotten much better at writing in active voice, but there are times when I am certain that mangling a sentence to use active voice, as suggested by the tools, ruins the mood or feel of the scene. passive voice, for which these tools are immensely helpful. One of the features of these that I have been working on is active vs. I'm making decent progress on a story, and I tend to do my drafts in Microsoft Word and use Grammarly to get additional grammar checking as I go along. ![]() When to keep the passive voice and when to remove it Before I launch into this, I've perused these threads and they don't quite answer the specific question I have in mind:
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