Using the Active Voice

I want you to notice something about the responsibilities bulleted under each past job in the resume example. Notice the words that begin each sentence: Assist, mediate, counsel, assisted, reviewed, ensured, created and interviewed. What do each of these words have in common? First, each of them is taken from the job ad, so they are keywords. Secondly, and more importantly, they turn each sentence into an active voice sentence instead of the passive voice sentence.

Okay, I don’t want to give a grammar lesson, but I do need to explain the difference between the two and why active voice is so important. Active voice sentences puts the action of a sentence—what’s being done in the sentence—in the verb. It makes a sentence strong, assertive and clear. Passive voice puts the emphasis on the subject of the sentence, effectively hiding the verb, and making a sentence more complex than it really needs to be.

What’s important to us is that it forces the subject to immediately follow the verb, which starts the sentence. Thus, it makes the point you are trying to make much more clear. Let’s look at a couple of examples. First a sentence in the active voice:

Counsel employees in matters of job performance, and provide guidance for personal problems.

Notice how easy it is to find your point. A reader immediately understands what it was you did in this position; there are no questions left in the reader’s mind. Now let’s look at the same sentence put in the passive voice:

My responsibility included counseling employees in matters of job performance, and providing guidance for personal problems.

The reader’s eye has to travel over three unnecessary words to finally get to what it was you actually did at your last job. If you consider that the word, “counsel,” is a key word, they we want it to leap off of the page. The second sentence doesn’t leap, but instead it lies meekly by and expects the reader to do all the work: it is passive.

So, with regards to how you describe your past jobs or your qualifications, you always want to begin the sentences with active voice verbs as in the example. If you’re not sure whether your sentences are active or passive, just look at the word beginning the sentence. If it is a verb, chances are its going to be active voice. Sentences like this state that you are doing, or have done something. You assist, you mediate, you counsel; you are active! However, if the sentence starts in some other way, like in the second example, chances are it is a passive voice sentence and desperately needs to be restructured.

While we’re on the subject, look again at the bullets in the example resume. Notice how the first words all have the same verb tense. In other words, the first three bullets—put in the present tense because they are describing current duties carried out—read the same way: assist, mediate, and counsel. They are all the same type of verb, present-tense. And the sentences under the next two sections also begin with the same type of verb: assisted, reviewed, ensured, created and interviewed. This type of consistency makes it easier to scan quickly, and looks cohesive. If there were another type of verb ending (for example, stick “mediating” into the second bullet under the first job listed), it would through off the list and make it look unpolished.

As far as coming up with the verbs used to begin the active voice sentences, the absolute best place to get them (and I advise my students that it should be the only place to get them) is from the job ad. As I mention above, think of them as keywords. These are things that the employer expects you to do, or expects you to have done in the past. Most every job ad you come across will have them, usually in the sections discussing the position’s responsibilities. These are things that the employer would like you to know how to do, so if you can express that point you are already above the curve. Further, these are words that the resume’s reviewers are going to be looking for, so if you can make it easy for them to find these words (by starting the sentence with them), you can get the point across that much easier.

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Last update: 27-03-2009 13:36