WRITING ACTIVE VS PASSIVE VOICE HOW TO

You want them to perform for you.Īctive Voice: The instructor graded the midterm exams. the subject of your sentence) a lot of money to act in your sentence. Side Note: Imagine that you are the director of your sentence, and you have paid your star (a.k.a. Make them the subject (star) of your sentence.What’s the action in the sentence? (graded).

STEP 1 - Write about making the sandwich in the active voice. When deciding between active or passive voice, ask the question: Is it an advantage for the reader to know the.

WRITING ACTIVE VS PASSIVE VOICE HOW TO

These steps help spot a passive sentence and revise it into the active voice: Click to see a step-by-step slideshow about using the active and passive voice to explain how to make a banana sandwich. With most Technical writing, active voice is the dominant voice used. Passive Voice:The midterm exams were graded by the instructor. Remember, you want to be “active” not “passive” in your writing. In a passive sentence, the person or thing acted on comes first, and the actor is added at the end, introduced with the preposition by. However, passive voice, instead of making a paper sound more professional, actually makes the writing unclear, hard to follow, and, at times, even boring. New writers often use the passive voice because they think it sounds more professional.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, active voices are all about action. English verbs have two voices active and passive. If youve ever gotten feedback from a teacher or professor that told you to stop writing in the passive voice, only to realize that you dont actually. Instead, writers prefer the active voice because the subject of the sentence is actually doing the action (thus making the sentence more commanding and confident). But in the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action: The cat chased the mouse. Writers try to avoid the passive voice when possible because the passive voice often leads to wordier and less powerful sentences.

Writing active vs passive voice