This may be a noble question for Shakespeare but not for newsletters!
The passive voice, often written with a “to be” verb, is great for business, science and other mundane prose. For the quick and informative newsletter, however, it is flat and confusing.
What makes a sentence passive rather than active?
Grammatically speaking, passive voice eliminates the subject and emphasizes the receiver. For example: “The book will be read to the children.”
How boring! How confusing! Who is doing the reading?
Let’s give this sentence some interest and emotion. Let’s give it a subject! Let’s write: “The father will read the book to his children.”
Technically, the passive voice is not incorrect or without purpose—we just use it far too often. Check your newsletter articles. Vary your sentence structure and keep the passive voice to a minimum.
Leave the “to be’s” for Shakespeare!
This posting is taken from the Reaching Readability newsletter by Adunate Word & Design (who, by the way, is me!)
Categories: blogging · church communication · writing
Church design matters…at least hundreds at the HOW Design Conference thought so.
In a recent posting in Church Marketing Sucks, guest blogger Michael Buckingham writes of his exciting opportunity to present a church marketing and design topic at the HOW Design Conference. For those of you unfamiliar to the industry, HOW is a leader in graphic design publications and conferences. It’s not exactly the conference you’d expect to host a church-related topic.
Buckingham writes that he anticipated “maybe a half-dozen people” to show up for his portion of the conference. Instead it was standing room only. And not only did people come, they discussed, asked questions and stayed afterward.
How exciting is that?!
This is an awesome affirmation of God’s hand at work. It’s great to see people recognizing the need for quality graphic design in church communications. And it’s fantastic to know we can learn from what normally is an extremely secular industry and apply it to our spiritual mission.
God works in wondrous ways!
Categories: blogging · design · marketing
