Entrepreneurs are energetic. They are ambitious for themselves, their ideas, and their organization. They hustle to convince investors, employees, and customers to believe their vision.
Scientists and engineers who start companies are especially energetic. More is at risk. Their ideas are unproven, but confidence in their technology propels them forward.
And yet, the communication from these companies too often hides the bustle and the drive underneath. The text on their websites and in their white papers uses a passive voice. The reader gets the impression that an unseen actor is causing events to occur, that no one in particular is driving the machine.
Why is this? Why do these hard-charging risk takers allow their company to communicate a sanitized story in a passive voice?
One culprit you can blame is the tendency of bureaucratic large companies to obfuscate. And our tendency to imitate their flabby and passive language. To avoid showing any weakness or imperfection, in business writing we too often adopt a language that allows no one in particular to take responsibility.
But that’s not the only cause. You can also blame scientific writing and the scientific training of people in technical fields. In science, the goal is to discover and communicate facts. We don’t negotiate facts, they are the truth and we discover them. The passive voice is often used in scientific writing to communicate the message: “This isn’t just me saying these results are true. These experiments were conducted and the truth emerged.”
However, business is not science. It is not only about facts. It is about a truth that you negotiate. It is a truth that requires more than the just the logic of your argument. To persuade others, they must have confidence in your character and feel you have connected with their emotions and attitudes.
What should business writing be like? Richard Lanham states firmly:
It ought to be fast, concrete, and responsible. It should show someone acting, doing something to or for someone else. Business life offers few occasions for the descriptive set-piece; it chronicles history in the making, depicts someone working on matter or with people. It seldom relates abstract concepts for the fun of it; abstractions occur as parts of a problem to be solved. Business prose ought, therefore, to be verb-dominated prose, lining up actor, action, and object in a causal chain and lining them up fast.
In business we have to know who is doing what to whom. Buyers have to know you will take action and what you will do. The active voice states clearly that you take responsibility for the results you will produce.
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