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:

  1. Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
  2. Hit “Ctrl-F” to bring up the “Find” dialogue
  3. Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
  4. Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
  5. Check the “Find all word forms” box
  6. Click “Reading Highlight” and select “Highlight all”
  7. 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.

  1. Select a color to highlight with (the default is yellow)
  2. Hit “Ctrl-H” to bring up the “Replace” dialogue
  3. Type the word “be” into the “Find what” space
  4. Hit the “More” button to expand the advanced options
  5. Check the “Find all word forms” box
  6. Click “Format” at the bottom and select “Highlight”
  7. 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.

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