HOW TO AVOID 'To Be' VERBS IN WRITING: A short tutorial from essay help online, on how to identify "to be" verbs and how to avoid them in your writing. It’s easy for readers to get lost in the use of passive voice: it’s boring, stagnant, and doesn’t compel the information in any kind of forward motion. Although passive voice isn’t necessarily a death sentence, most of the time it doesn’t do much good for your writing as a whole. "To be" verbs are the most common culprit for passive voice in a writer’s work. Any form of the verb "be," no matter its context, contributes to a boring passive voice for the article, which is why avoiding "to be" verbs in your writing will make it more readable and easier to understand. You’ll also keep the reader's attention focused on what you have to say instead of boring him or her to tears. UNDERSTAND WHAT 'To Be' VERBS ARE: "To be" verbs are all the different forms of the verb "be." This includes: be, am, is, are, was, were, been, and being. Most of the time, especially where passive voice is concerned, these verbs act as helping verbs to another, more meaningful verb. Not all forms of "be" are bad and worthy of elimination from your content, however. For example, if you use the verb "is" for something that simply "is" and there’s no other way to say it, that’s fine. What you want to avoid are verbs that clog up the meaning and the flow of the sentence... basically, passive voice. If you could easily rearrange some wording in the sentence to get rid of the "be" verb without changing the meaning, then this is a verb that needs to be done away with. It may help you to come up with a “Verb List” of verbs that you find you can commonly use to replace "to be" verbs in your writing. This way, you have something to refer back to for ideas when you get stuck. HOW TO AVOID THEM: If you’re new to writing or just don’t do it very often, you’ll find that these "to be" verbs creep up in your content a lot more than you would like. When you’re writing a report for school or work, you want to sound professional, and for some reason, writing in a passive voice just feels natural and easy. It’ll take a lot of time and practice before you’re able to write in an active voice all the time, but until then, there are a few things you can do to get rid of them. Option 1: Write with an awareness of what you’re typing to nip passive voice in the bud by killing it before it ever enters your sentences. When you find yourself typing out one too many "to be" verbs, force yourself to think of another way to word the sentence, and rewrite it. This will take some time, but you’ll quickly learn where your problem areas are and how to fix them. Option 2: Write to your heart’s content and then go back and edit out as much passive voice as possible. This may be hard to do, especially if you’re proud of the content you’ve produced. Once you’ve written your article out in its entirety, go back and pick it over in detail to weed out as many "to be" verbs as possible. After you’ve done this, read back over it again to see how it improves the flow and readability of your article and to check for other mistakes. EXAMPLES: Instead of writing “I think it is fun to write every day,” write “I enjoy writing on a daily basis.” Simple, one-word versions of "to be" verbs usually express a state of permanence, which prevents your content from having a forward motion and leaves the reader stuck in one place. Write “If he had told the truth, we would have left earlier” instead of “If he had been telling the truth, we would have been on our way earlier.” Most of the time, passive voice constructions are easiest to spot when they involve more than one word to express a simple action. In this example, the two simple actions are “tell” and “leave.” In this example, the sentence remains a little wordy because it is conditional in nature, but you cut down substantially on the number of words the reader has to weed through by eliminating "to be" verbs. Teaching writing, essay write help, research writing, and more. If you need help, feel free to contact me for details.

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