Hello everyone! I know some of you were sad that I missed last week’s Grammar Wednesday, but I didn’t miss it. I was in Guatemala–no interwebs for a whole week! I started to go into withdrawal.

Here’s your Grammar Wednesday! It’s about active phrasing and passive phrasing. I apparently used to write passive phrasing, and if you read FOREVER BURN, you’ll see it all over the place. *head desk* yup, but I learned. I just had to have someone point it out to me a couple dozen million times.

This is how it goes–in the easiest form. Look for the “was.” It’s mostly overused and the “have been.”

She was walking down the road.
She walked down the road.

She was leaning down to pick up a rock.
She leaned down to pick up a rock.

She had been having weird thoughts lately.
She had weird thoughts lately.

Get it?! I hope so. There are a lot of other ways to see passive phrasing. You can always go into MSword and turn it on. It’ll underline other passive phrases. In most of the fanfiction that I beta read for, and even some of the original fiction, I find a lot of passive phrasing. Not only are you writing it in a more concise sentence structure, but you’re writing it in a way that makes it more realistic and stronger.