Three reasons to pack in the passive voice

Why your word choice might be costing you sales

One thing you will never find me doing is making blanket statements about the passive voice. In addition to copywriting, I’m a published novelist, and I know perfectly well that the passive voice is a respectable, functional and necessary element of the English language. There are some sentences that simply don’t work as intended in the active voice (“She was elected by over 50% of voters,” for example, transposes inelegantly from the passive), and I have little time for the kind of advice that suggests this particular construction should be avoided (see what I did there?) at all costs.

However.

Copywriting is not like novel writing. There are crossover points, for sure – both involve telling a story, both strive to activate the reader’s imagination, and both involve evoking the reader’s senses in the service of an overall goal. But the key difference is that the goal of copywriting is to sell: an item, a service, a company, an idea. That’s where the passive voice makes things more complicated. Here’s why.

​Who’s your subject?

In the passive voice, the subject of the sentence is acted upon, rather than – in the active voice – doing the action. In basic sentence construction, this is natural and instinctive. 

You wouldn’t say, for example, “The coffee was drunk by Jenna.” You would say “Jenna drank the coffee.” Jenna is the subject, the glass is the object, and, in the active voice, the verb is actuated by the subject upon the object.

In sales copy, though, the subject might be fuzzy. Jenna might be among your target audience, but you don’t want to make other potential customers feel like you’re only marketing to Jenna. So you avoid directly addressing any one person. Who uses this coffee pod? Everyone with an Acme Coffee machine! But we can’t possibly address them all, so to avoid the appearance of excluding the people you want to include, you fuzz your construction up a little.

What does that look like in practice? Here’s what: “This coffee pod can be used with any machine from the Acme range!”

Job done. However…

Fuzzy doesn't sell coffee pods

As James Spillane points out, corporations use the active voice for a reason. This is the reason:

Image credit: James Spillane

The passive voice distances the reader from the action. The active voice – or the imperative mood – demands engagement. While a novel written in the second person might struggle to find a reader (trust me, I’ve tried), second person address in sales copy invites your potential customer to imagine themselves in a world where they’ve made that purchase.

First person works just as well, but in a slightly different way. “I’m loving it,” McDonalds insists. Who’s loving it? I am, because McDonalds has invited me to place myself into the role of satisfied hamburger consumer. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but “I’m loving it” places that role at my feet. “It’s being loved” turns the happy consumer into an abstract, unformed, unknown quantity. Who’s it being loved by? We have no way of knowing. It’s certainly not us.

Active and imperative suggest confidence in your product

And if you’re not confident in your product, why should your potential customer take a chance? In the case of our mythical coffee pods, sure, they can be used with any machine from the Acme range, but that suggests a theoretical future action that may or may not come to pass. In this case, direct address brings the customer closer to the product. 

In the active case, that looks like: “You can use them with any coffee machine from the Acme range!” 

Or, if we wanted to go all-in on the features/benefits angle: “For great-tasting coffee at the flick of a switch, they work with any coffee machine from the Acme range.”

This heavily implies that you’re pretty sure Jenna, our putative customer, already has a coffee machine from the Acme range, because why wouldn’t she? It’s great tasting coffee at the flick of a switch!

The same can be said of the imperative mood. “Just do it,” Nike tells us, implying that “just doing it” is easier when you’re kitted up on their high-quality but reasonably priced sportswear. “Have it your way,” Burger King enjoins us, because naturally we’ve already made our choice of internationally beloved burger restaurant and, burger connoisseurs that we clearly are, we have specifications. 

In terms of selling coffee pods to Jenna, the imperative might look like, “Drink better coffee with Acme coffee pods,” or, to draw on the original example, “Use them with any coffee machine from the Acme range!” Obviously, there’s a fine line between imperative and imperious, but if Nike’s slogan didn’t cross it – and it’s super bossy, when you think about it – you’ve clearly got plenty of leeway.

Sell more products with the active voice

The bottom line is, sales copy is about positing a hypothetical future, in which your potential customer has decided to make the purchase, and presenting it as though it’s already happened – or, at the very least, inevitable. The passive tense makes that more difficult to do.

So, while it’s a beautiful, elegant feature of the English language, and without question does not deserve the derision it seems to have attracted, there’s a time and a place. And sales copy is neither of those things. If your website text is distancing, your product descriptions more descriptive than productive, or you’re looking for ways to pep up your customer communications, give me a shout. Together, we’ll activate your customer journey.

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