Active Voice is a writing style with a direct, clear tone. Content written in Active Voice is straightforward and focuses the reader’s attention on the subject of the sentence. When writing in Active Voice, structure your sentences so that the subject performs the action.
Use it when you want the reader to focus on the subject of your sentence and the action it is doing rather than on the action’s target. Consider this example:
Eva drives her car to the store.
In this example, the subject is “Eva” who performs the action (“drives”) in the sentence. This is a sentence written in Active Voice.
Now consider this example:
The car was driven to the store by Eva.
In this example, the action is performed on the subject of the sentence (“was driven.”) The subject of the sentence did not perform the action. This is called Passive Voice, and although there are times when Passive Voice is effective or preferred, Technical Writing and Content Creation should not use this form of writing.
By maintaining an Active Voice, you can keep your content simple and straightforward to read, avoiding confusion. It needs less effort to read when users are in a hurry, or trying to fix an issue. It also helps readers who may not be reading in their first language, and makes translation of content to other languages easier and more accurate.
