Local Revision: Passive and Active Voice

The dreaded passive voice always manages to stealthily slide into everyone's writing just like a cowbird's egg in another's nest.

Link to draft

Stylurus. "Nest of a Yellow Warbler" 6/28/8 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Here is a spreadsheet of all the active and passive voice verbs in chronological order.

1. Looking at the breakdown of your verb choices here, what do you notice about your current draft? Are the actions in your piece mostly general, vague or non-specific? Are the actions mostly vivid and specific? Are there instances of passive voice? Summarize what you learned by analyzing your verb usage in this way.

Most of the actions are non-specific, but there are still a bunch of specific actions too. The passive voice list is surprisingly short as I changed some as I noticed when they could be improved. The ones in the list I left, as they worked grammatically.

2. Based on this analysis, how could your use of verbs be improved overall in the project? Be specific and precise in explaining this.

Well, I changed some of the passive voice as I went and am in the process of changing the vague actions to more specific actions. However, some of the actions will remain non-specific as they are merely reports of what happened without specific parties preforming the action.