: Re: Techniques to get rid of "was" and make one's writing more engaging These are my techniques: Changing the order of the sentence: I was happy because of what she did. What she did made me

There's nothing wrong with "was". Not every sentence that uses "was" is passive voice, and even if the sentence were passive voice, that wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

The passive voice is when the sentence has no subject. A common test for passive voice is to add "by zombies" at the end of the sentence and see if it, at least grammatically, makes sense. For example, "The girl was hit" is passive voice, and the test of adding "by zombies" turns the sentence into "The girl was hit by zombies" which makes grammatical sense. "The girl was beautiful" is NOT passive voice, despite the use of the word "was", and if you try the test of adding "by zombies", you get "The girls was beautiful by zombies", which makes no sense.

So... your examples are not passive voice. And even if they were, there are good times to use passive voice. See When *should* I use passive voice? for discussion/examples.

The verb "to be" is a good verb, in all its conjugations. Overusing it will lead to boring writing, just as overusing any verb will lead to boring writing. But using it sometimes? Not a problem. Check your favourite books - you'll probably see lots of "was" and other forms of "to be".

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