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Welcome to The RN2writer Show where we help nurses and other clinicians become freelance writers. I'm your host, Elizabeth Hanes. I'm a nurse and former six figure freelancer. And today, I coach people like you on strategies and techniques that can help you thrive in your writing career to Hey, before I get started, don't forget to expand that description box here on YouTube. Or check the show notes on Spotify and Apple podcasts. For all of the resources we're mentioning in this episode that can help you launch a freelance career too. I'll be honest, my writing skills pretty much sucked when I was first starting out as a writer. Does that surprise you? When I moved from Houston back to Albuquerque in 2017, I went through a bunch of my old clips like I'm talking literal clips printed on magazine pages and newsprint paper, because I had to decide whether to keep them or throw them out, move them or not move them, digitize them or not digitize them. I thought it would be a fun nostalgic trip down memory lane to reread some of my earliest work around, I'd say 2005. And boy, was I wrong. I was quite horrified, in fact, at how terrible my actual writing was my literal writing my ability to knit beautiful sentences into paragraphs and entire stories. And I was taken aback by this because in my mind, I had always been a fabulous writer. Oh, the rose colored glasses, right? I'm happy to tell you, however, that I improved my writing style over time. And eventually clients actually sought me out specifically for my writer leave voice. That was my ticket to the big bucks. And it can be yours too. Today, I want to tell you the one thing you can do to vastly improve your writing, and I won't keep you in suspense. It's rooting out passive voice. Okay, a little grammar lesson. in written English, American English at least. There are two primary types of grammatical voice active and passive. Before independence come for me. Yes, I know those aren't the only two voices. But I'm not going to get dragged into the weeds and personally, I for example, love the subjunctive mood, though it's rarely used in English anymore. But anyway, for our purposes, we'll confine our discussion to active and passive grammatical voice active voice refers to sentences in which the doer of the action is identified. An example of this is the sentence, Joan threw the ball, the subject or the doer of the action, Joan is present and accounted for we know she threw the ball. However, if John was omitted from this sentence, if instead the sentence said something like the ball was thrown, then we would know this is passive voice construction, because one way to identify passive voice is to see if the doer of the action is present in the sentence. Here it is not. The sentence does not tell us who threw the ball in terms of style. Active voice is more pleasant to read than passive voice. And I feel I need not illustrate this concept much to nurses and other clinicians because who ever found a research paper or textbook to be pleasant to read? Not many, right? And the reason these texts aren't very pleasant to read is because they're usually written in passive voice. studies say things like the medications were distributed to patients every four hours, patients were monitored for side effects. Boring. That boring passive voice is so hard to get through as a reader. It makes me want to go to sleep. But imagine if we changed that prose to active voice. Now it's much more interesting to read because it says, researchers distributed the medications to patients every four hours, nurses monitored the patient's for side effects. Part of the reason active voice is more interesting to read is because it paints a picture in the active voice sentences we can almost see the researchers distributing the pills to the patients. We can see the nurses monitoring the patients for side effects. Clinicians tend to write in passive voice. Because we read so much of it in our jobs. Those passive voice sentence construction become ingrained in our brains. So when we go to write, that's what our brain spits out through our fingers to the keyboard. But if we want to write engaging prose that editors love, then we need to retrain our brains to create active voice constructions. Here are a few ways to do that. First, start reading great health writing every day. It doesn't matter what source you use for this. Read the New York Times Well section. Read Men's Health magazine stories, read everyday health articles. Reading these active voice pieces will help retrain your brain to apply those same constructions and cadences to sentences when you sit down to write. Next, review your writing for passive voice and rewrite most of those sentences to make them active. You can identify passive voice constructions in a few different ways. My favorites are to look for state of being verbs. These include the verbs is, are was were and so on. Those verbs very out often signal passive voice. Pro tip, you can use words search function to look for each of those state of being verbs. Check the sentence, and if it's passive construction, change it. Also, review your sentences one by one to make sure the doer of the action is always present. If they're not, then you need to rewrite to include the doer of the action. If you practice reading and writing active voice sentences, pretty soon that will become natural for you. And then like me, your beautiful writerly voice will shine through and make you lots of money as a freelance writer. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The RN2writer Show. Don't forget to click the subscribe button here on YouTube so you never miss an episode. And hey, again, we have links to everything mentioned in this podcast in the show notes. You can find those on YouTube by expanding the description box below the video. And if you prefer audio, please follow The RN2writer Show on Spotify or Apple podcast. I'm your host Elizabeth hanes and until next time, keep pitching
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
