CAN you imagine if, in the middle of the night, your soft-spoken wife, husband, or sibling suddenly speaks in a hard-edged voice that definitely could not be hers or his? You'll no doubt be puzzled, shocked, probably thrown into a state of panic. The totally unexpected is rarely welcome. It seriously violates the familiarity, sense of security, and normal rhythm of everybody's personal universe. We thus should cultivate the art of avoiding announced shifts in voice, tense, person, and number in our writing, and of spotting and eliminating them every time they creep into our prose.

The first thing to guard against are unnecessary shifts from the active to the passive voice. Although the passive voice is sometimes desirable to use for effect, the change of point of view could be terribly confusing. Consider the jarring voice shift in this sentence: "We doubted the authenticity of the woman's documents, and the truthfulness of her testimony was also doubtful." That sentence in consistent active voice: "We doubted the authenticity of the woman's documents and the truthfulness of her testimony."

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