Local Revision: Passive and Active Voice

I have further examined my verbs, but this time I categorized them into two categories: passive and active voice. 

Active Voice (General)	Active Voice (Specific)	Passive Voice
is	pop	has led
help	suffers	has made
advances	feeding	has upset
caused	collide	has forced
goes	sleeping	has been
create	wheeled	was declared
described	smelled	was completed
asked	scrubbed	was allowed
drafted	squeeze	was drafted
called	responsive	have conducted
believe	move	have argued
based	tests
pursued	scans
remains	concocted
indicates	posing
return	cough
reverse	breathing
findings	sat
gives	push
took	listened

Indigo, Alex "Microphone" 10-11-07 via Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

1.  Looking at the breakdown of your verb choices here, what do you notice about your current draft? Are the actions in your piece mostly general, vague or non-specific? Are the actions mostly vivid and specific? Are there instances of passive voice? Summarize what you learned by analyzing your verb usage in this way.

The actions in my draft are both general and specific in active voice usage, with instances of passive voice. I found that a mixture of  different verb tenses/voices is important in any form of writing. I want to have active specific verbs so that I can vividly describe scenarios, but I also need general verbs so that I can effectively get my point across without too much wordiness.

2. Based on this analysis, how could your use of verbs be improved overall in the project? Be specific and precise in explaining this.

To improve the verbs in my draft I should used more descriptive verbs. The descriptive verbs that I do have are not the most exciting descriptive verbs out there. I should also go through my project and make sure that the active and passive verbs are spread evenly throughout the entire piece. I don't want chunks of active specific followed by chunks of active general. It should a mix.