Skill Focus – Passive Voice

Let's turn those sluggish sentences into action heroes.

✨ Welcome to the Passive Voice Pit Stop

So, you've been told your sentence is passive.
Or maybe you just feel it—like your verbs are wearing socks on a waxed floor.

Don’t worry. Passive voice isn’t a villain… but too much of it can slow your writing down, suck out the energy, and leave your reader floating without a subject to grab onto.

Let’s fix that. Gently. With snacks if needed.

🧠 What Is Passive Voice?

In passive voice, the object of the sentence gets promoted to the front… and the doer of the action often goes missing.

Passive:
“The book was thrown across the room.”

Active:
“Emerson hurled the book across the room.”

In short: If you can add “by zombies” to the end of your sentence—and it makes sense—you’re probably in passive voice.

“The samples were collected… by zombies.”
Yeah. Let’s rewrite that.

🛠️ Try This Rewrite Drill

Here’s your practice sentence:

“The message was delivered late.”

Now, revise it to make the subject do the thing. Add personality. Bring the sentence to life.

Need a nudge? Try starting with who did the delivering, and let them own the action.

🎯 Optional Challenge

Take a sentence from your own writing and test it:

• Can you tell who did the action?

• If not, rewrite it so they show up and do the thing.

Then, bring your rewrite back to Quillwyn and ask for feedback. She lives for this stuff.

💬 Want More Help?

Ask Quillwyn in the chat:

“Can you help me find passive voice in this paragraph?”

She’ll highlight the sneaky stuff and show you how to punch it up—one verb at a time.