PITY the passive voice. No feature of the grammar of English has such a bad reputation. Style guides, including that of The Economist, as well as usage books like the celebrated American “Elements of ...
Whether you write on a part- or full-time basis, you can benefit from becoming more familiar with an often-overlooked aspect of writing that is treated in today’s column: active and passive voice ...
When the subject of a sentence isn't doing something, the verb is passive. On the other hand, a sentence is active when the subject performs the verb (action). For example, in this sentence the verb ...
Passive and active voice simply refer to the relationship of the subject to the verb. In a sentence using the active voice, the subject of the sentence (doer) performs the action described by the verb ...
Teaching students to write in the active voice will significantly strengthen their essays because sentences written in the active voice often have much more impact than those written in the passive ...
40 preschool children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years were required to illustrate the meaning of reversible passive sentences in which noun animacy was systematically varied. There were 2 main ...
50 years after its publication, Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" still influences our thinking about language, particularly our disapproval of the passive voice. But our linguist Geoff Nunberg ...
When you first used any service to detect your writing mistakes, you probably noticed a warning against passive voice: “Passive verbs make your writing less direct. Try to use an active verb instead.” ...
Both sentence pairs make sense. Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend ...