Word Passive Voice Highlighting Revisited: Now for Word 2003
Last week, I explained how to highlight uses of the passive voice in your writing, using Word 2007. Here’s how to do the same thing in Word 2003 and earlier versions.
To reiterate: the passive voice is when you explain what’s happening in such a way that the action happens to the subject rather than having the subject do the action. Consider this sentence:
- The Fonz was standing against the wall.
It’s a weak sentence, becuase standing is sort of happening to the Fonz, who we all know is not the type of guy to take such an unengaged approach to life. Consider this, instead:
- The Fonz stood against the wall.
That’s the Fonz we know and love, taking charge of his standing!
The verb “to be” and its various forms are the hallmarks of the passive voice. They make your action into something that a character or feature is rather than something they do. Politicians love the passive voice, because it distances them from the effects of their bad decisions: “Mistakes were made” versus “I made a mistake.” “Unemployment is up” rather than “I caused unemployment to go up.”
You shouldn’t worry overmuch about the passive voice as you write — worry about it instead when you revise. (The passive voice isn’t something you should worry about too much while you’re writing; instead, it is something you should worry about when you are revising. See the difference?) Using a couple of neat tools in Word’s “Find” dialogue, you can easily highlight every potential trouble spot.
Here’s how I told you to do it in Word 2007:
- Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
- Hit “Ctrl-F” to bring up the “Find” dialogue
- Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
- Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
- Check the “Find all word forms” box
- Click “Reading Highlight” and select “Highlight all”
- Click “Close”
Word will highlight every instance to the verb “to be” in the color you chose — including conjugations like “am”, “is”, “was”, “were”, “been”, and so on. Go through and review each sentence to see if there isn’t a stronger way to phrase it. When you’re done, hit “Ctrl-F”, click “Reading Highlight”, and select “Clear highlights”.
Previous versions of Word don’t have the “reading highlight” feature, but you can approximate the effect. You’ll need to use the “Replace” function instead of “Find” and replace the formatting around the “be” words.
- Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
- Hit “Ctrl-H” to bring up the “Replace” dialogue
- Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
- Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
- Check the “Find all word forms” box
- Click “Format” at the bottom and select “Highlight”
- Click “Replace All”
The only disadvantage of this method is that it actually changes the document, where Word 2007’s Reading Highlight feature only temporarily highlights words. To undo it, you’ll have to do another Replace All, adding Format > Highlight to the “Find what” space and removing formatting from the “Replace” space.
I was inspired to comment merely because the Fonz was referenced.
Er…
You inspired me to comment merely by referencing the Fonz.
Ayyyyy!
GREAT tip. Maybe link from here to the 2007 article?
“The Fonz was standing against the wall.” “The Fonz stood against the wall.” are both active. In both situations ‘The Fonz’ is the one doing the action. Neither of them are passive, at all.
It’s not about who is doing the action, I think, but about what the action is. In the first, the verb is “to be”; it tells us something about the way Fonzie is. The second tells us what he’s doing.
Stephanie: Added the link. I meant to do it when I was writing the post but I forgot.
For Word on Mac OS X:
Use the directions for Word 2007 to highlight the phrases you want. If you have trouble getting the highlighting to “stick,” try changing the highlight color while the Find window is still open (and before clicking on the document itself).
To remove the highlighting, simply set highlight color to None, then Select All (Command + A) and hit the highlight button (in the Formatting Toolbar).
Both these examples are active voice. They have different but equally valid meanings. The Fonz was standing against the wall is past continuous (imperfect tense). It allows you to create a context for other events. (e.g. ‘when Joanie arrived, the Fonz was standing against the wall’ means he was already there when she arrived).
The Fonz stood against the wall is past tense. It’s ambiguous on its own, but clear in context (e.g. ‘when Joanie arrived, the Fonz stood against the wall’ means he wasn’t standing against the wall when she arrived but did so soon after).
Are you an idiot? “He was standing against the wall,” is not passive voice. It’s past progressive. Passive voice uses past participles. “Standing” is a present participles, not a past participle. Passive voice would be like, “He was stood against the wall,” stupidly implying that he is paralyzed or something and some other person leaned him up against the wall.
Yes, I am an idiot.
That said, I’m starting to think that the passive voice doesn’t exist outside the famous example, “mistakes were made”. There is a quite well-known take-down of Strunk and White which makes the case that not a single of their passive voice examples are actually passive voice.
Oh well.
Here’s the thing: phrases that de-emphasize the agent are boring. Phrases where the subject passively receives the action are boring. Phrases that describe the subject’s behaviors as a state of their being, rather than as an action, are boring. “He was standing” — standing is a thing he was, not an action he did; “he stood” is much more active and interesting.
Call it — and me — what you will. The bottom line is that if you’re using “is” statements in every sentence, you’re boring the crap out of me. And probably most of your other, non-me readers as well. Even though Strunk and White were idiots.
The point of the past progressive is that it gives background information before the action starts. “I was doing my homework when my friend called.”
wow people. Seriously this is an article on how to filter passive voice, not a blog for OCD English freaks. Thank you for the article Dustin, its a great help to me that i now know how to filter passive words from my essay writing. Obviously if you are searching for a way to filter passive you know what passive is. Therefore you are not too awfully confused by the two sentences. I dont really know what to say here other than Thank You to the writer of the article and “wow” to the detractors. Maybe you are all the undergrad students grading my papers and have nothing better to do than troll the internet and show off your highly superior English knowledge.