We have reanalyzed your figures in order to determine the range of error. The results will be announced when the situation is judged appropriate. Your figures have been reanalyzed in order to determine the coefficient of error. For most of your academic writing, however, your instructors will recommend the active voice.

It is a good writing technique when we don’t want to be bothered with an obvious or too-often-repeated subject and when we need to rearrange words in a sentence for emphasis. Photomicrographs were taken to facilitate easy comparison of the samples.ĭon’t get the idea that the passive voice is always wrong and should never be used.For example, in a science lab, the passive voice makes sense when writing: Note that passive voice is sometimes appropriate to use, particularly in the sciences when the doer of the task is unimportant. At any rate, you can see how the passive voice can cause wordiness, indirectness, and comprehension problems. It’s this ability to cover the actor or agent of the sentence that makes the passive voice a favorite of people in authority, such as politicians, who want to obscure their agency (as if the town wasn’t responsible for collecting the taxes). Active: The town will collect the taxes according to the local rules and regulations.Passive: The taxes will be collected according to the local rules and regulations.Revise Weak Passive-Voice SentencesĪs we’ve mentioned, the passive voice can be a shifty operator-it can cover up its source, that is, who is doing the acting.

Be careful when using the passive voice- it can sometimes create confusing sentences that are difficult for the reader to follow. Active: Students who study hard typically earn strong grades.įigure 1.Passive: Studying can improve your grades.Active: The Parkland student protests created changes in Florida gun laws.Passive: Changes in gun laws were made as a result of student protests in Florida.These two active voice sentences are more specific, and you get a bit more information as a reader. The aggressive truck hit the car from behind.If these sentences used an active voice, they could read: Despite these sentences being completely grammatically sound, we don’t know who hit “me” or what struck the car. The passive voice “hides” who does the action. You may have noticed something unique about the previous two sentences: the subject of the sentence is not the person (or thing) performing the action. In the simplest terms, an active voice sentence is written in the form of “A does B.”Ī passive voice sentence is written in the form of “B is done by A.”īoth constructions are grammatically correct, but active voice is a more powerful sentence construction for most academic writing. Let’s look at a couple more examples of the passive voice:

When possible, use the active voice to convey who or what performs the action of the verb. In other words, something is being done to something by somebody: The ball was thrown by the outfielder. While the passive voice has a place, particularly in some subjects like the sciences and social sciences, its overuse can result in writing that is wordy, vague, and stuffy. If you wrote the same sentence in the passive voice, it would emphasize the recipient of the action. The subject, “outfielder” actively performs the action of the verb “throw.”

For example, here is a sentence that uses the active verbs: The outfielder throws the ball. What does that mean? The active voice emphasizes the person or thing doing the action in a sentence. You may have heard that it is best to use active verbs when you write.

Active voice meaning