Passive Voice & Paper-ease: Do’s & Don’ts

Academic writers are often addicted to “paper-ease”—or “pompousese,” as comic Stephan Pastis calls it—the temptation to use pompous or imprecise words such as “expounds,” “commentates,” “contests to,” “utilize,” “parallels,” and “elaborates on.”

Never use a long word when a shorter one will do the same job just as well.

Avoid unnecessary words and phrases that sap the energy and humanity from your writing:

Don’t: In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the author depicts her childhood…
Do: In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel depicts her childhood…

Don’t: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics argues that…
Do: In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues that…

Don’t: McCloud goes on to say that…
Do: In his discussion of closure, McCloud argues that…

Don’t: Bechdel goes on to say that…
Do: When Alison gets her first period, Bechdel describes her reaction as….

Don’t: In particular, concepts are applied [by zombies] to Alison’s father, Bruce Bechdel, throughout the story.
Do: Bechdel manipulates closure—the process by which readers make inferences about what happens between comic frames—to convey the  degrees of closeness between the young Alison and her father, Bruce Bechdel.

Don’t: The power of comics is often underestimated [by zombies].
Do: In  Understanding Comics, a theory of comics explained in comic form, Scott McCloud refutes the assumption that comics are a simple, childish genre by both explaining and modeling various techniques comic artists use to tell stories.

Be on the look out for dangling and misplaced modifiers, which are the missing limbs that often accompany the zombies of passive voice:

After reading Fun Home, it is evident that the words Bechdel has written are much more powerful than the images depicted

Scott McCloud delves into strategies graphic novelists use to draw us into their work in his book Understanding Comics.

Alison sees her father as Icarus, who plummeted because he flew too close to the sun in an extended metaphor of homosexuality but, in a novel twist, believes that it is because of his crisis with his sexual identity that he guided her through her struggle with her sexual orientation.

Most importantly, don’t do this.

Additional resources:

More Do’s & Don’ts for the College Writer

Don’t Dangle Your Participles in Public