Now Credosity finds your passive voice

Passive voice is one of the biggest problems we’ve seen in the 8000 corporate writing samples we’ve reviewed.

You’re almost certainly doing it.

But it’s bad. Evil, even. It’s unclear, clunky and people trust you less when you use it.

Now, after seven months work, thousands of new lines of code, and a contribution to the world’s open-source community, we’re excited to announce our shiny new passive-voice finder!

Here’s how it looks in a zombie email we unearthed:

Can you see the problem?

Credosity says ‘should be used’ is passive, because Brad didn’t say WHO should use active voice. Unclear. Bad zombie (hey, tautology!).

Ask a zombie

To check if you have passive voice, try to insert ‘by zombies’ after the verb [thanks Prof. Johnson]. If it still makes sense, you have passive voice. For example, ‘The report was written’, becomes, ‘The report was written by zombies.’ Hello passive!

Clearly, zombies didn’t write the report, so who did? To rewrite in active voice, add the real ‘actor’: e.g. ‘Felix wrote the report.’

Order, not tone

People often think passive voice means passive tone. Nope. Tone is how something sounds, e.g. ‘Hi-ho, looks like a zombie attack’ vs. ‘Run!’

Active voice is purely about whether you include an ‘actor’, and put the ‘actor’ in front of their ‘action’ (the verb).

Credosity now finds the two types of passive voice (it has braaains) and helps you convert them to active:

So if you want to be clearer, briefer and have people trust you more, use active voice.

Even better, use Credosity to help you do it!

Order up!

Like Credosity to do something it doesn’t yet? Let us know! We’re listening.

We’d also love to hear your thoughts on our new feature, or anything else. Just leave a comment below!

Petrina, Paul, Nick, Virginia & Heather

#writeyourfuture