Passive Voice: Linking Verbs and Wordiness

Removing Passive Voice Makes for More Concise Writing

Editing is my 'day job', so to speak, and the last two novels I edited were too long, both well over 120,000 words. This works for established authors, but not so much for new authors who are untried yet. When writing fiction articles, the writer usually has a word count limit as well. Being concise while still being entertaining is very important for any type of writer, fiction or non-fiction.

The factor that determines how long is too long for a piece of writing usually comes down to money. It costs money to print books, magazine, and other print media. The more pages in the book the more expensive it is for the publisher to print. For web copy, if the writing is too long, people won't read it, and if they don't read it, then the maximum return for page views is not achieved.

So I set about the task of editing these two novels to reduce the word count and thus reduce the page count so that they are more marketable books. What I found with the first novel is that the author just used too much descriptive background details that were not necessary to further the story. The second manuscript I edited was able to be cut down from 170,000 words to about 120,000 words just by cutting out passive voice phrases!

Granted, I had to cut a little more than just passive voice, but let me give you a sample of how passive voice and wordiness helped reduce the word count on this piece of writing:

~~ It seemed to be that he might have been looking at...

How wordy is that?

It's not only a bit passive, but it's just plain wordy, and also redundant.

While fiction writing doesn't need to be as concise as technical or non-fiction writing, and passive voice is acceptable every now and then, writing predominantly in passive voice is going to make your reader tired. When I edit manuscripts written in passive voice, I get tired of reading. It's like running everywhere you have to go instead of just walking there. It takes too much brain energy to really just sink into the reading and enjoy it.

So what is passive voice?