When do we use active voice

The telephone was invented in the nineteenth century. Finally, passive sentences often sound wordy and indirect. They can make the reader work unnecessarily hard.

And since they are usually longer than active sentences, passive sentences take up precious room in your paper:. Since the car was being driven by Michael at the time of the accident, the damages should be paid for by him. If you now use a lot of passive sentences, you may not be able to catch all of the problematic cases in your first draft.

But you can still go back through your essay hunting specifically for passive sentences. At first, you may want to ask for help from a writing instructor. The grammar checker in your word processor can help spot passive sentences, though grammar checkers should always be used with extreme caution since they can easily mislead you.

A sentence is in the passive voice , on the other hand, when the subject is acted on by the verb. Doing this usually generates a preposition as well.

That sounds much more complicated than it is—passive voice is actually quite easy to detect. For these examples of passive voice, we will transform the three active sentences above to illustrate the difference. Bananas are adored by monkeys. Making the sentence passive flipped the structure and necessitated the preposition by.

In fact, all three of the transformed sentences above required the addition of by. Using the active voice conveys a strong, clear tone and the passive voice is subtler and weaker. That said, there are times the passive voice is useful and called for. That sentence construction would be helpful if the squirrel were the focus of your writing and not the dog. Here is an example of a business communication that could be strengthened by abandoning the passive voice.

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This handout will explain the difference between active and passive voice in writing. It gives examples of both, and shows how to turn a passive sentence into an active one. Active: The candidate believes that Congress must place a ceiling on the budget. Passive: It is believed by the candidate that a ceiling must be placed on the budget by Congress. Active: Researchers earlier showed that high stress can cause heart attacks. Passive: It was earlier demonstrated that heart attacks can be caused by high stress.

Active: The dog bit the man. Passive: The man was bitten by the dog. The data processing department recently presented what proved to be a controversial proposal to expand its staff.