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 ...

THE cult of the active voice is one of the most enduring in English grammar. From grade school onwards most everybody is taught that sentences in the active voice are the end-all and be-all of English ...

Combine short choppy sentences to create smoother prose. Short sentences are effective when used rarely; continually using short sentences creates stilted, awkward prose. I am not advocating paragraph ...

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 ...

I vividly recall when an editor in chief invited me to publish in a well-known journal. Fresh from defending my dissertation, I still grappled with understanding how publishing worked in academia—like ...

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 ...

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 is an important grammatical structure that appears in every form of written and spoken English. Knowledge of this construction is vital for reading and writing English in everyday ...