With the price of housing at such inflated levels, those loans cannot be paid off in any shorter period of time. We will announce the results when the time is right. 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. 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-policemen, city officials, and, yes, teachers. Active: The teacher will grade the papers according to the criteria stated in the syllabus.Passive: The papers will be graded according to the criteria stated in the syllabus.It links Carlos with the phrase very serious scientist.Īs we’ve mentioned, the passive voice can be a shifty operator-it can cover up its source, that is, who’s doing the acting, as this example shows: In this case was is acting as a linking verb. In this case was indicates that the sentence happened in the past it does not indicate the passive voice. If this sentence were written in the active it would be something like this: “ prepared the samples in a clean room before sending them out for further examination.” Since we do not know who prepared the samples, the active sentence is incomplete. The action ( prepared) was done to the subject of the sentence ( samples).

This is the general principle to follow as you compose in the active voice: Place concrete nouns that can perform work in front of active verbs. To revise the above, all we did was look for the two buried things (simulations and zones) in the original version that could actually do something, and we made the sentence clearly about these two nouns by placing them in front of active verbs. Two model simulations (Figures 1 and 2) illustrate how zones of fracture concentration influence groundwater flow. But the reader’s task gets much easier in the revised version below: As often happens, the passive voice here has smothered potential verbs and kicked off a runaway train of prepositions. The sentence is becoming a burden for the reader, and probably for the writer too. Groundwater flow is influenced by zones of fracture concentration, as can be recognized by the two model simulations (see Figures 1 and 2), by which one can see. So why all the fuss? Because passive constructions can produce grammatically tangled sentences such as this: The passive choice slightly emphasizes “the rate of evaporation,” while the active choice emphasizes “the size of an opening.” Simple. Active voice: The size of an opening controls the rate of evaporation.Passive voice: The rate of evaporation is controlled by the size of an opening.The subject of the sentence is not doing that thing.Īs you read at the two sentences below, think about the how the different voice may affect the meaning or implications of the sentence:.Something is happening (the sentence has a verb that is not a linking verb).There are two key features that will help you identify a passive sentence: In the first, to be is a continuous past verb, and in the second to be is past tense linking verb. “She was falling” and “His keys were lost” are not passive sentences. When identifying passive sentences, remember that to be has other uses than just creating the passive voice. The passive is created using the verb to be and the past participle. 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. Jasper was thrown from the car when it was struck from behind.In the simplest terms, an active voice sentence is written in the form of “A does B.” (For example, “Carmen sings the song.”) A passive voice sentence is written in the form of “B is done by A.” (For example, “The song is sung by Carmen.”) Both constructions are grammatically sound and correct. Let’s look at a couple more examples of the passive voice: You’ve probably heard a lot about them-and you’ve probably been warned away from the passive voice. There are two main “voices” in English writing: the active voice and the passive voice.

What is passive and active voice