MathiasCavanaugh.com

Are passive voice sentences really harder to read?  I hear this a lot as a reason to not use, or to at least use sparingly, the passive voice in writing.  So I decided to do a little test.  I took a series of sentences and wrote them in both the passive and active voice.  I then checked their readability statistics using Microsoft Word’s native tool for this.

Example 1: 

Active: “I mailed the letter.”

Flesch Reading Ease: 97

Flesch-Kincade Grade Level: 0.7 Read more…

I like audio books. I am not afraid to admit to it. In fact, most of my reading these days comes in the form of listening to audio books.

Why I like audio books is no great secret.

1. During the course of my two hour commute every week day, I get two hours of reading in. No kids screaming, no wife constantly interrupting me to fix something. It’s just me, the audio book, my car, and that moron in front of me who is now cutting me off. HEY! Buddy, would it kill you to use a turn signal? Read more…

When I’m editing, I find that the most effective means of correcting mistakes is just to simply read what is written out loud. If it sounds bad coming out, then it needs work.

I don’t know what it is, but sitting there, reading silently, just let’s too many awkward sentences pass by. Only by reading out loud do I find the errors.

Somehow, it seems, the mind auto corrects to ignore the problems that clearly exist.