Writing in the active voice makes the meaning clear while keeping sentences from becoming complicated and wordy. Sentences using passive voice are not necessarily wrong, just less effective than ...

If the subject is doing the acting, the sentence is in the active voice (“Joe kicks the ball”); if the subject is acted upon, the sentence is in the passive voice (“The ball is kicked by Joe ...

Here’s another example of how it does this: Where active voice would separate key ideas, passive voice can unite them. Compare these sentences: So whether you’re writing about your memorable ...

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 ...

Microsoft Word 2010 can help punch up your document's prose by alerting you when you use passive voice in a sentence. If you write "the goal was achieved" instead of the more active "we achieved ...

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 on what tone you wanted to ...

In many English sentences, you have an agent as the grammatical subject, doing something to a patient, the grammatical object. Active voice would give you a sentence like the cat (agent/subject ...

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 on what tone you wanted to ...

(Sentence 2 happens to be in the past tense, but 3 is not; both 2 and 3 are in the passive voice.) 2. The passive voice uses more words than the active voice. 3. A sentence with a verb in the passive ...

This handout is also available for download in PDF format. We refer to a sentence as being in the "active voice" when the subject is performing the action of the sentence (the verb). A sentence is in ...