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Active vs. Passive Voice — How Does it Impact Readability?

Learn more about passive vs. active voice, how they affect readability, and how to switch between the two. Create the most effective and readable content for your audience!

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Introduction

Our text compare tool is a fantastic, lightweight tool that provides plagiarism checks between two documents. Whether you are a student, blogger or publisher, this tool offers a great solution to detect and compare similarities between any two pieces of text. In this article, I will discuss the different ways to use the tool, the primary features of the tool and who this tool is for. There is an FAQ at the bottom if you run into any issues when trying to use the tool.

What makes Originality.ai’s text comparison tool stand out?

Keyword density helper – This tool comes with a built-in keyword density helper in some ways similar to the likes of SurferSEO or MarketMuse the difference being, ours is free! This feature shows the user the frequency of single or two word keywords in a document, meaning you can easily compare an article you have written against a competitor to see the major differences in keyword densities. This is especially useful for SEO’s who are looking to optimize their blog content for search engines and improve the blog’s visibility.

Ways to compare

File compare – Text comparison between files is a breeze with our tool. Simply select the files you would like to compare, hit “Upload” and our tool will automatically insert the content into the text area, then simply hit “Compare” and let our tool show you where the differences in the text are. By uploading a file, you can still check the keyword density in your content.

URL compare

Comparing text between URLs is effortless with our tool. Simply paste the URL you would like to get the content from (in our example we use a fantastic blog post by Sherice Jacob found here) hit “Submit URL” and our tool will automatically retrieve the contents of the page and paste it into the text area, then simply click “Compare” and let our tool highlight the difference between the URLs. This feature is especially useful for checking keyword density between pages!

Simple text compare

You can also easily compare text by copying and pasting it into each field, as demonstrated below.

Features of Originality.ai’s Text Compare Tool

Ease of use

Our text compare tool is created with the user in mind, it is designed to be accessible to everyone. Our tool allows users to upload files or enter a URL to extract text, this along with the lightweight design ensures a seamless experience. The interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy for users to compare text and detect the diff.

Multiple text file format support

Our tool provides support for a variety of different text files and microsoft word formats including pdf file, .docx, .odt, .doc, and .txt, giving users the ability to compare text from different sources with ease. This makes it a great solution for students, bloggers, and publishers who are looking for file comparison in different formats.

Protects intellectual property

Our text comparison tool helps you protect your intellectual property and helps prevent plagiarism. This tool provides an accurate comparison of texts, making it easy to ensure that your work is original and not copied from other sources. Our tool is a valuable resource for anyone looking to maintain the originality of their content.

User Data Privacy

Our text compare tool is secure and protects user data privacy. No data is ever saved to the tool, the users’ text is only scanned and pasted into the tool’s text area. This makes certain that users can use our tool with confidence, knowing their data is safe and secure.

Compatibility

Our text comparison tool is designed to work seamlessly across all size devices, ensuring maximum compatibility no matter your screen size. Whether you are using a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, this tool adjusts to your screen size. This means that users can compare texts and detect the diff anywhere without the need for specialized hardware or software. This level of accessibility makes it an ideal solution for students or bloggers who value the originality of their work and need to compare text online anywhere at any time.

Knowing when to use the active vs passive voice can significantly impact the readability of your content. 

Many readability tools and grammar checkers recommend limiting passive voice in writing, but why? What is it about the passive voice that makes content more difficult to read? Is an active voice always the better option?

Read on to learn more about the passive vs active voice, how they affect readability, and how to switch between the two so you can create the most effective content for your audience.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

  • In the passive voice, the target of the action is the focus.
    • For example, “Brian was called by Alyssa.”
  • With an active voice, the focus is on the sentence’s subject doing the action.
    • For example, “Alyssa called Brian.”
  • You can think of active voice as the default way of writing to improve readability, but there are some situations where passive voice is appropriate.
  • To convert text from passive to active voice or (active to passive), you can go through content manually or use an active-to-passive voice converter.

Passive vs. Active Voice: What’s the Difference?

While they can have the same meaning, the difference between passive and active sentences lies in their structure.

Passive voice

You use the passive voice when something occurs to a sentence’s subject. It follows this type of construction:

Passive voice = subject + auxiliary verb + main verb + target

Example:

The music is written by Charlie.

The music (subject) + is (auxiliary verb) + written (main verb, written in the past tense) + by + Charlie (target).

Note: As noted by Purdue University, ‘by’ often appears in passive voice but not always.

Is passive voice the same thing as past tense?

Passive voice isn’t the same as past tense. 

Past tense refers to when an action was performed, while passive voice focuses on who is performing the action. 

Example:

  • “Charlie wrote the music” is past tense.
    • It refers to something that happened in the past. 
  • However, it’s written in the active voice.
    • Charlie is the sentence’s subject and is performing the action.

Active voice

With the active voice, the subject is the person or thing doing something. Its structure looks more like this:

Active voice = subject + active verb + target

Example:

Charlie writes the music.

Charlie (subject) + writes (active verb) + the music (target).

The sentence's subject switches when you convert from the passive to active voice. While it may not seem like this should make a difference (after all, it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence), this is key to improving the readability of your content.

Active vs. passive voice examples

Sometimes, one example just isn’t enough. Here are a few other active vs passive voice examples to help you distinguish between the two:

Active: Sally conducted a study on local librarians.

Passive: A study was conducted on local librarians by Sally.

Active: The person made a mistake.

Passive: Mistakes were made.

Passive: Troy likes computers.

Passive: Computers are liked by Troy.

Note that the passive sentences often use more words, don’t always include who is doing the action, and even sound a bit clunky compared to the active ones. They’re certainly not the more readable options.

How Does Active vs. Passive Voice Affect Readability?

While active vs. passive voice is an important part of checking grammar, it also impacts readability.

In most cases, using an active voice makes content more engaging and easier to read. It can even make it more concise by saying the same thing in fewer words. 

However, this doesn’t mean you should avoid passive sentences completely. There are some instances where a passive voice makes more sense.

When to use active voice to improve readability

It’s helpful to think of active voice as a “default” way of writing. Because of its benefits for readability, active voice is what you should aim for when you sit down to write a piece of content.

Use active voice to:

  • Get the reader to focus on the subject and its action instead of its target.
  • Sound more conversational, confident, and energetic.

Example:

Passive: The cat was chased around the room.

Active: The dog chased the cat around the room.

By focusing on the target (the cat) of the action (being chased), the first sentence is a little vague, leaving the reader to question who chased the cat. 

However, the second sentence introduces the subject (the dog) and answers that question immediately, giving the reader a clearer picture of what’s happening.

When to use passive voice to improve readability

While using the active voice is typically the clearest and easiest-to-understand option, there are some situations where using the passive voice makes sense.

Use the passive voice to:

  • Get the reader to focus on the target, not the subject, of a sentence.
  • Indicate that you don’t know or the reader doesn’t need to know the subject.
  • Vary sentence structure.

Example:

News anchors may use passive sentences, like “A business was vandalized last night.” In this case, the news anchor is highlighting that a business was vandalized, not who did it. 

How to Change Passive Voice to Active Voice

When you’re in the zone and typing away, it’s easy for passive sentences to sneak in there and impact the readability of your content. Fortunately, you can often edit them out quite easily.

To manually convert passive voice to active voice in your content, follow these steps:

  1. Look for sentences containing the passive voice.
  2. Take the auxiliary verb out of the sentence.
  3. Switch up the subject.

Example:

Passive voice: Patrick was called by Pete.

To change this into the active voice:

  • Remove the auxiliary verb “was.”
  • Make “Pete” the subject.

Pete called Patrick.

Done!

Now, as you can probably imagine, going through and changing everything manually can be time-consuming. If you prefer a simpler, time-saving approach, consider using an active-to-passive voice converter tool instead.

Simply plug some text into a converter and let it identify and change the sentences. With this task off your hands, you’ll have more time to focus on creating the kind of people-first content that resonates with readers and search engines.

Boost Readability With Proper Active vs. Passive Voice Use

While using the active voice is often a surefire way to improve the readability of your content, there are a few situations where the passive voice is more appropriate, if not necessary. By knowing the difference between active vs passive voice and how to convert one from the other, you can create more readable content for everyone to enjoy.

Jess Sawyer

Jess Sawyer is a seasoned writer and content marketing expert with a passion for crafting engaging and SEO-optimized content. With several years of experience in the digital marketing, Jess has honed her skills in creating content that not only captivates audiences but also ranks high on search engine results.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.

In The Press

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Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

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I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.

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Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

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ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

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For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

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