![]() ![]() You can leave the driving force of the action out, and place emphasis on the receiver of the action, by writing a short passive sentence.įor example, in this sentence the emphasis is on the fact that the woman has received a jail sentence: There might be occasions when you want to leave the perpetrator behind the action unclear - if the person receiving the action is more significant than the perpetrator, or the perpetrator is unknown, irrelevant, or obvious. For instance, “Last year, a tree was planted on my road,” is short passive because it does not identify who planted the tree. On the flipside, if the subject or performer of the action is not stated, it’s a short passive sentence. A telltale sign of a long passive sentence is the “by…” prepositional clause. This means that the agent performing the action is stated, but is not the subject of the sentence. When to use the passive voiceĪll of the passive sentences we’ve seen so far have been what’s known as long passive. That’s not to say that you should always avoid the passive voice there are times when using it can improve your writing. You might think this makes you sound more like a fancy-pants author, but the truth is: the simpler, more direct sentence is better writing. ![]() If you were to write the same sentence in the passive voice it might sound like this: The following sentence is written in the active voice: But even though she’s doing the swinging, she’s not the grammatical subject. This tells you that Louise is the one doing the action. Going from active to passive voice flipped the structure of the sentence and necessitated the prepositional phrase “by Louise”. So here, the sword - which is being swung - is the subject. When a sentence is passive, the subject is the thing receiving the action. In the passive voice, the same sentence would look like this: The following sentence is active: the subject is performing the action. Let’s take a look at some examples of passive voice and active voice side-by-side to see why. If that’s the case, you’re better off using the active voice. Nine times out of ten, you’ll be writing a sentence with a defined subject performing an action.
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