Passive Voice as a Social Justice Issue // Advanced Novel Writing Topics
CW: colonization + abuse. In this video, in my "Advanced Novel Writing Topics" Series, I talk about the difference between Passive and Active voice in a bit of a different way. Building off my video on the levels of a sentence, I talk about how while active and passive sentences may have the same propositional information, they have rhetorical differences. Often writing in active voice is a matter of social justice: giving credit where credit is due and holding the guilty accountable, while passive voice is an obfuscation of responsibility and agency. This is how I teach active voice to my students, and they tend to stop writing in passive voice after this!! As fiction writers, I don't think we need to say all passive voice is bad, but I do think we should be making careful decisions based on characterization and psychology, and not simply bad habits. I'm calling this an advanced topic, because while many writers know vaguely that they shouldn't be writing in passive voice, they aren't necessarily aware of the harm that it does. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:20 Proposition vs. Rhetoric 01:37 Example 1: India was colonized. 04:21 Example 2: She was attacked. 05:32 Example 3: Beloved was written in 1987. 06:37 Applying this to Fiction 09:25 Concluding thoughts Link to the video where I talk about propositions + rhetoric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9lqwEA6RFI&t=17s
CW: colonization + abuse. In this video, in my "Advanced Novel Writing Topics" Series, I talk about the difference between Passive and Active voice in a bit of a different way. Building off my video on the levels of a sentence, I talk about how while active and passive sentences may have the same propositional information, they have rhetorical differences. Often writing in active voice is a matter of social justice: giving credit where credit is due and holding the guilty accountable, while passive voice is an obfuscation of responsibility and agency. This is how I teach active voice to my students, and they tend to stop writing in passive voice after this!! As fiction writers, I don't think we need to say all passive voice is bad, but I do think we should be making careful decisions based on characterization and psychology, and not simply bad habits. I'm calling this an advanced topic, because while many writers know vaguely that they shouldn't be writing in passive voice, they aren't necessarily aware of the harm that it does. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:20 Proposition vs. Rhetoric 01:37 Example 1: India was colonized. 04:21 Example 2: She was attacked. 05:32 Example 3: Beloved was written in 1987. 06:37 Applying this to Fiction 09:25 Concluding thoughts Link to the video where I talk about propositions + rhetoric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9lqwEA6RFI&t=17s