Why do readers prefer active voice? Lessons from Yoda and Ivar the Boneless

The 3 reasons people find active voice easier to read

Read these 2 versions of a sentence:

Version 1: A draft was circulated by the director.

Version 2: The director circulated a draft.

Which did you find easier to read? Version 2, I’m guessing. But why?

Some will say, oh, that’s easy. Because it’s in active voice.

Yes, it is. But what does that mean exactly?

Grammatical breakdown of version 2: active voice

It means the subject precedes the verb precedes the object: subject verb object – SVO for short.

And by putting the actor in front of the action, we’ve made the writing more energetic. In fact, in our workshops, we call this tool, ‘vigorous verbs’.

The first version, on the other hand, was in passive voice.

Grammatical breakdown of version 1: passive voice

It inverted the order, so the subject came last, not first.

Does it make that much difference? Yes, it does.

One study compared 9 research papers on the topic and found all concluded that passive voice:

• reduced readability
• slowed processing
• lowered comprehension levels.

But why? Why do we prefer that SVO order?

There are 3 reasons:

1. English speakers expect it.
2. We’ve expected it since the time of Ivar the Boneless.
3. Only Yoda uses a weirder word order than passive voice.

1. Why do readers expect active voice?

Look at these 3 words and create a sentence:

eat |  grass  |  cows

I’m guessing you came up with cows eat grass, yes?

That word order will seem completely logical to you. Of course, it does.
But it wouldn’t to Yoda.
Yoda would look at those 3 words and come up with grass cows eat.

So, why do we, as English speakers, gravitate to cows eat grass?

Because it puts the subject in front of the verb in front of the object.

Grammarians classify languages by where the subject, verb and object typically appear in sentences, and they consider English to be an SVO language.

This means that, generally, English speakers will expect to read sentences that use the subject verb object order.

This is true even for people who have no idea what a verb is, let alone a subject or an object.

That’s because, if we’re English speakers, it’s what we’re used to.

2. Why did SVO matter more after Ivar the Boneless?

English wasn’t always so reliably SVO in structure. In fact, if anything, it more often used an SOV (subject object verb) structure – like Latin. But, in truth, it was a bit all over the shop.

In Old English, word order was much less fixed than it is in English today. Why? Because it could be.

What’s changed?

Let’s look at these 2 sentences to see how we typically treat nouns in a sentence today.

You’ll see that ‘sun’ is spelled the same whether it is the subject or the object.

This will seem entirely unremarkable to you today, but it would have shocked speakers of Old English.

Why?

Because Old English commonly changed the ending of the noun to show if it was the subject or the object.

In that first sentence, when ‘sun’ is the subject, they’d have used the word ‘sunne’.

In the second, when ‘sun’ is the object, they’d have used the word ‘sunnan’.

The different endings – or inflections, as they’re known – identified the subject and the object for the reader, which means they could use any word order they liked. However, we lost those helpful markers some time after the Vikings invaded England in the 9th century.

The 2 groups didn’t come to any formal accord about dropping these endings. And Ivar the Boneless didn’t lead a vicious, vengeful campaign to stamp out the practice. They simply fell away as the 2 lingually distinct groups started communicating with one another.

But, hang on.

If the subject and object are no longer spelled differently, how do we tell which is which?

Primarily through word order: SVO – subject verb object.

That’s why, since not long after the Viking invasion, English speakers have not only expected the SVO order, but we have also relied on it to quickly turn words into meaning.

3. Why do readers struggle with passive word order?

SVO is a very common language structure. It’s not only in English. It’s also used in Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, which means that about half the world expects SVO.

There are other popular language structures, but the order we see in passive voice is not one of them.

After SVO, the next most common structure is Latin’s SOV, which is also seen in Japanese, Hindi and Farsi. Then comes VSO, which is in 9% of the world’s languages, including Welsh and Māori.

It’s followed in popularity by VOS, which you’d pick up in Fijian but appears in only 3% of the world’s languages.

Where else do we find the word order we find in passive voice?

This extremely rare order is used by:

• the Urarina language, spoken by about 3,000 people in the north-west of Peru
• the Hixkaryana language, spoken by about 500 on a remote tributary of the Amazon.

Only Yoda’s OSV structure is rarer. So, as Yoda might say, ‘Unwise using passive voice is. This word order few people expect. Your readability it will damage.’

If we want to make life easier for our readers, we’ll use the word order that English speakers expect – and have expected for nearly 1,000 years. We’ll energise our writing by using the more vigorous verbs of the active voice.

What to do next

Sign up for our new online, self-paced refresher course. It’s a great way to remind yourself of all the key plain language principles, including vigorous verbs.