The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing, blamed ...

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 ...

The passive voice focuses more on an action that took place and places less importance on the person who performed the action. Writers who use passive voice may cause headaches and frustration among ...

For many writers, feedback that your copy is "too passive" can be frustrating. The passive voice is, after all, grammatically correct. But there's a reason that public relations and communications ...

How to find and rewrite instances of passive voice in your Microsoft Word documents Your email has been sent Passive speech is awkward and sometimes hard to understand. Let Word find your passive ...

Active voice keeps readers interested and engaged. You can use Microsoft Word features to find passive verbs, and even entire passive sentences, while you compose your documents. Configure the Word ...

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. Strunk & White hated it. George Orwell did, too. Nearly every grammar text and English teacher say it: The ...

"We applied an external magnetic field of 4 T while increasing the pressure to 300 kPa." or "An external magnetic field of 4 T was applied as the pressure was increased to 300 kPa." Which is the ...

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 ...

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 ...