The minds of readers and listeners are like combustion chambers. You can spark them to life with reactions, associations, and insights—if you give them the right words as fuel.

But if your fuel is bad—if your mixture is not fresh and well-blended—you’ll not generate the combustion you’re looking for. You’ll deliver duds.

Among the worst duds in language, according to brain research today, are passive voice, aged idioms, helper “ads,” woolly words, and overlong sentences.

Communications experts have long argued that these practices are losers. But if you identify them as you’re composing, you won’t lose your audience. You’ll turn your style around, and as the science shows, engage people persuasively.

We live in a world where persons and things act on other persons and things. To have more impact, highlight the forces of action when you communicate. Make the actor—the person or thing causing impact—your sentence’s subject.

Above all, avoid the passive voice, in which you defer or omit saying whom or what is acting on whom. Compare the passive, “The audience was fed with what they wanted to hear,” with the active, “The demagogue fed the audience what they wanted to hear.”

The passive voice, compared to the active, risks disengaging readers. Research confirms that it slows people down, makes content harder to understand, and hampers what people remember.[i] In one study, researchers asked college students to read one of two passages, one in passive style, the other, active. The “active” readers, quizzed afterwards, scored 25 percent better on understanding.[ii]

In another study, jury members had to interpret, then paraphrase, seventeen instructions meant to guide their deliberations. One group got the instructions in the original passive voice, the other in the (rewritten) active. The members with the passive version misunderstood the meaning much of the time. Those with the active understood nearly 49 percent more (alas, still not all).[iii]

Use the passive only when you absolutely need it, and remember that at times the passive is actually better.[iv] A common instance is when you want to cast the object of a sentence, not the subject, in the spotlight. Still, as a rule, put the star actors first: “Abraham Lincoln chopped wood” (four words). “Wood was chopped by Abraham Lincoln” (six words).

Who doesn’t fill their writing and speaking with idioms? The words and phrases spring to mind easily. They also seem to spark flames of activity in the mind—at least when you’re the one delivering them.

But many idioms—timeworn phrases—don’t elicit much spark at all. They fizzle, and that’s because they don’t much fire people’s motor and premotor neurons during comprehension. That is in contrast to their literal equivalents or fresh, lively metaphors, which do so easily.[v]

Merlin Sheldrake, in The Entangled Life, wrote about a hallucinogenic experience, and when he did, he didn’t say, “I couldn’t believe how that blew my mind.” Instead, he dispensed with idiom and wrote, “A school of thoughts scattered through my mind like startled minnows.”[vi]

“Piece of cake,” “easy as pie,” “bored to tears,” “do a number on,” “foot........

© Psychology Today