Writing Technical Requirements: The Fifth Commandment

Scot Witt, Friday, August 10, 2007 @ 4:54 pm

The Fifth Commandment:

Maintain Active Voice and Keep It Wholly

The boy threw the ball.

Passive Voice
sentence:

The ball was thrown by the boy.

 What's the difference?

1.      Active
Voice sentence is shorter and more to the point.

2.      The
reader doesn't find out who actually performed the action until the end of the
sentence.

3.      The
writer could have eliminated the last three words of the Passive Voice Sentence
and still had a complete sentence.

4.      The
Passive Voice sentence includes a helper verb for thrown, Passive Voice always
uses a form of the verb 'to be.'

5.      The
Passive Voice sentence changes the Subject (the person place or thing that
performs the action) to the Direct Object (the person place or thing that is
acted upon).

6.      The
Passive Sentence can include a new thingie grammarians call an
"agent," which is the actual subject of the sentence (boy).

The grammar lesson pretty much sucked, didn't it? Look at it
from your reader's point of view.

If we use the old A.T. & T. Communication model (http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/introductory/sw.html), we don't get the complete picture. Besides what we're doing on the sending end (organizing and encoding) the receiver has to decode the message which involves the reader's intelligence, experience, interest and motivation: and you have no control of any of those variables. That's why the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method works. And active voice is less complicated for your reader- making it easier to decode and understand.

That's why you
don't use Passive Voice unless you have to convolute the sentence to avoid it.

Next up: The Sixth Commandment: Santa isn't the only Clause.

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tech development

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