Passive voice: The lazy dog was bitten by the quick brown fox.
For our next example, we’ll take a more complex passive sentence. How do I change passive voice into active?Ĭhanging the passive voice into the active voice is simple. Unless your sentence falls into one of those four categories, there is a good chance that you can improve clarity by rewriting. Pesticides were discovered in 80% of supermarket fruit by researchers at NYU.Ĥ) When you want to be deliberately vague about responsibility.3) Your focus is on the object, rather than the subject. In this case, we are not concerned with who built the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building was completed in 1931.2) When the doer of the action is irrelevant. In the above instance, we don’t know who robbed the bank. 1) When the doer of the action is unknown. Like most writing rules, there are exceptions! Let’s take a quick look at when passive voice works best. There are a few scenarios when passive voice is best. They can’t really picture the scene until they know who has done the action.ĭon't believe us? We're backed up by our friend George who has sold a book or two in his time: Imagine that you're painting a picture of the scene in your reader’s head. It’s usually better to put your action up front. Action and the verbs showing action is what gives your writing power. In the first example you have to wait until the end of the sentence to find out who is doing the action, which means your sentence has less impact. Both sentences are essentially saying the same thing, but in the first one, the focus is on the bottle in the second, the focus is on Joe. He is doing the recycling, and the bottle is the object of the recycling. In the above example, Joe is the subject, he is the do-er. With each sentence, think about who is doing the action. Let's look at some examples of passive and active voice: The passive voice means that you have written the object of your sentence first and then put the subject of your sentence at the end. What's the difference between active and passive voice? However, it’s often stylistically better to use active voice. Here’s the thing: passive voice isn’t actually grammatically incorrect. Many self-proclaimed grammar snobs consider passive voice to be incorrect. Passive voice is one of the most polarizing bad writing habits out there.
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