In the 1980s, Johnson & Johnson, the makers of the popular pain reliever Tylenol, were faced with an unprecendented crisis. Someone had tampered with their product by adding deadly cyanide to the capsules, causing the deaths of several people. The company responded first by conducting a total recall of the product, and eventually redesigned the product to eliminate any future risk of tampering. They also took ownership of the problem in their public announcements and press releases, even though the tampering was not their fault. Their actions not only saved their reputation, it set the tone for the rest of the industry, and many companies followed suit, creating the tamper-proof products and packaging that we see on store shelves today.
When I was a student, one of my professors used the Johnson & Johnson example as a good lesson in writing by contrasting it with what many other companies do when they face a potentially profit-damaging problem. By being forthright, honest, and by owning the issue, Johnson & Johnson eventually regained the public’s trust. Unfortunately, some companies try to deny problems by hiding under passive language, stating “mistakes were made.”
First of all, we all learned in English Comp that this is simply poor writing practice. Passive language eliminates the actor, making things happen out of thin air, without motive, and therefore, liberated from judgment. In a public Web site, there are only three reasons to use passive language and they are all bad: to hide some wrongdoing, point the blame elsewhere, and deny there is a problem in the first place.
Passive voice is common in technical or scientific writing, where the author is trying to take a more removed and objective viewpoint. Your Web site, unless it is a clearinghouse of highly technical research papers, needs to be more active and focused on the people who are reading your content. I tell my students to take action and take ownership, and that will take care of most of the instances of passive language.
For example, take this very bland and rather meaningless sentence: “It was determined that the report was inconclusive.” Let’s look at this sentence in light of the journalistic five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Who determined the report was inconclusive? What was the report about? Why should I care? Maybe part of the problem is that you don’t have enough information to make this content even worth publishing or promoting on your Web site. That’s a bigger issue for your content strategy team to tackle, and something we’ll talk more about at a later date.
A quick fix is to put someone in charge in a passive sentence: “The committee determined that the report was inconclusive.” Not a stunning revelation, but at least I know that there are people on a committee involved, and not just the mechanistic universe churning out inconclusive reports. (Learn more about fixing passive voice from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center.)
Active voice and attribution are key composition tools to make your content meaningful, compelling, and clear to your users. Make action and ownership part of your company’s mission and vision – it will clarify your editorial process and help you gauge the actual worth and purpose of much of your content. Next time we’ll talk about how this is the first step toward a tight and efficient long term content strategy.