Passive Voice Pdf Download
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This handout will help you understand what the passive voice is, why many professors and writing instructors frown upon it, and how you can revise your paper to achieve greater clarity. Some things here may surprise you. We hope this handout will help you to understand the passive voice and allow you to make more informed choices as you write.
A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Take a look at this passive rephrasing of a familiar joke:
With the previous section in mind, you should also know that some instructors proclaim that the passive voice signals sloppy, lazy thinking. These instructors argue that writers who overuse the passive voice have not fully thought through what they are discussing and that this makes for imprecise arguments. Consider these sentences from papers on American history:
The passive voice is often maligned by teachers and professors as a bad writing habit. Or, to put that in the active voice: Teachers and professors across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit.
But the passive voice is not incorrect. In fact, there are times when it can come in handy. Read on to learn how to form the active and passive voices, when using the passive voice is a good idea, and how to avoid confusing it with similar forms.
In a passive voice construction, the grammatical subject of the clause 3________ the action of the verb. So the ball from the above sentence, which is 4_________ the action, becomes the subject. The formula:
In this case, we know what brought about the action: It was the experience of traveling alone in South America. But the thing the sentence most urgently wants us to know is that a person, Cleo, had an important thing happen to them. So making the recipient of the action (5____) the subject of the sentence, using the passive voice, and tucking the performer of the action (6______________) after the action as the object of the preposition 7__ makes sense.
Despite what any well-meaning English teachers may have told you, none of the sentences above are written in the passive voice. The sentence about the leaves, in fact, was (wrongly) presented as an example of the passive voice by none other than Strunk and White in 8_____________________.
Those two sentences are examples of the active voice and the passive voice. Certain kinds of writing are best suited for the active voice, while the passive voice is most appropriate for other kinds of writing. Understanding how, when, and why to use each is key to being an effective writer and speaker.
See how with the first pair, the passive voice makes the request feel more like a suggestion? In the second pair, the passive voice makes the message sound stilted and formal rather than an urgent exclamation.
Use the active voice in any sentence that focuses on the doer of the action. Unless the majority of your writing is scientific or reporting incidents involving unknown perpetrators, most of the sentences you write should be in the active voice.
The passive voice is a grammatical construction. The easiest way to explain it is by contrasting it with the active voice. The active voice is the standard English sentence structure. The simplest possible sentences feature an actor (the subject), who does (the verb) something to either a person, animal or thing (the receiver).
In the passive voice, the actor and receiver are switched around. The receiver then becomes the grammatical subject. Note that the meaning of the sentence stays the same, the only difference is the word order.
Secondly, the passive voice uses a sentence structure which requires more cognitive effort. Your reader will spend valuable working memory on making sense of the sentence. This decreases the likelihood of you getting your message across.
Moreover, we expect the actor to be in the subject position, so we are slightly disoriented. This means constructing an image of what happens takes a tiny moment longer. Again, these moments can easily add up if you overuse the passive voice.
In the example I gave, there is no added benefit to using the passive: the active sentence conveys the same information. Whenever you use passive voice, always consider whether a better, active alternative is available.
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In most cases, active sentences are easier to understand than passive sentences. After writing your text, scan it for passive voice constructions. Then, always ask yourself: is a better, active alternative available? If there is, use it. If not, use the passive voice.
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. Also, it explains how to decide when to choose passive voice instead of active.
In a sentence using _____________, the subject is acted upon; he or she receives the action expressed by the verb. The agent performing the action may appear in a "by the..." phrase or may be omitted.
Sometimes the use of passive voice can create awkward sentences, as in the last example above. Also, overuse of passive voice throughout an essay can cause your prose to seem flat and uninteresting. In scientific writing, however, passive voice is more readily accepted since using it allows one to write without using personal pronouns or the names of particular researchers as the subjects of sentences (see the third example above). This practice helps to create the appearance of an objective, fact-based discourse because writers can present research and conclusions without attributing them to particular agents. Instead, the writing appears to convey information that is not limited or biased by individual perspectives or personal interests.
You can recognize passive-voice expressions because the verb phrase will always include a form of be, such as 1_______________________ or 2____. The presence of a be-verb, however, does not necessarily mean that the sentence is in passive voice. Another way to recognize passive-voice sentences is that they may include a "by the..." phrase after the verb; the agent performing the action, if named, is the object of the preposition in this phrase.
You can recognize passive voice because the verb phrase will include a form of be (was, am, are, been, is). Don't assume that just because there is a form of 'be' that the sentence is passive, however. Sometimes a prepositional phrase like "by the" in the sentences above indicates that the action is performed on the subject, and that the sentence is passive.
Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either omitted or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it syntactically turns a transitive sense into an intransitive sense.[3] This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence.[4]
Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.[5] The use of passive voice allows speakers to organize stretches of discourse by placing figures other than the agent in subject position. This may be done to foreground the patient, recipient, or other thematic role;[5] it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion.[6] The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.
In some languages, passive voice is indicated by verb conjugation, specific forms of the verb. Examples of languages that indicate voice through conjugation include Greek, Latin, and North Germanic languages such as Swedish.
Norwegian (Nynorsk) and Icelandic have a similar system, but the usage of the passive is more restricted. The passive forms in Nynorsk are restricted to being accompanied by an auxiliary verb, which is not the case in Swedish and Danish.
In Latin, the agent of a passive sentence (if indicated) is expressed using a noun in the ablative case, in this case serv (the ablative of servus). Different languages use different methods for expressing the agent in passive clauses. In Swedish, the agent can be expressed by means of a prepositional phrase with the preposition av (equivalent here to the English "by").
English, like some other languages, uses a periphrastic passive. Rather than conjugating directly for voice, English uses the past participle form of the verb plus an auxiliary verb, either 9__ or 10___ (called linking verbs in traditional grammar), to indicate passive voice.
The subject of the passive voice usually corresponds to the direct object of the corresponding active-voice formulation (as in the above examples), but English also allows passive constructions in which the subject corresponds to an indirect object or preposition complement:
In sentences of the second type, a stranded preposition is left. This is called the 11_____________________ or 12______________ (although the latter term can also be used with other meanings).
The active voice is the dominant voice used in English. Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in 13_____________________, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice, but this is almost always based on these commentators' misunderstanding of what the passive voice is.[8] Contrary to common critiques, the passive voice has important uses, with virtually all writers using the passive voice (including Orwell and Strunk & White). [9]There is general agreement that the passive voice is useful for emphasis or when the receiver of the action is more important than the actor.[10] 5376163bf9
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