This is written about passive voice.
Contributed by Janette Siu on 26 September 2008 at 14:39Passive voice seems to be a favorite pet peeve of certain professors. They'll underline a sentence in your paper and write in angry red pen, "Don't use passive voice!" However, they often don't explain what passive voice actually is.
In fact, passive voice can be a little difficult to spot until you've been trained. You may or may not have noticed that the title of this article is written in passive voice. What makes it passive voice, and why is this such a heinous crime?
In grammatical terms, passive voice is making the direct object of the sentence into the subject of the sentence. In other, less confusing words, when you take the thing doing the action and put it after the verb (or delete it from the sentence), and then you take the thing having the action done to it and put it before the verb, that's passive voice. All of that explaining makes a very long sentence, so an example here will make the best explanation.
Passive voice: The cow was milked by the farmer.
In this sentence, the cow is having the action (milking) done to it, and it's the subject of the sentence. The farmer is the one doing the action, but he's the subject of a prepositional phrase, not the subject of the sentence. So your professor would want you to rewrite this sentence in...
Active voice: The farmer milked the cow.
Now the person doing the action (the farmer) is the subject of the sentence. This sentence is better than the one in passive voice because it is shorter and simpler.
The key to passive voice is that it often disguises who or what is doing the action in the sentence. Take the title of this entry, for example. If it wasn't for the little line beneath the title that says who contributed this entry, you would be at a complete loss as to who the author was.
This can be a good thing; when writing technical or scientific documents, you might want to avoid saying "I concluded the experiment at 4:30 pm," and instead say, "The experiment was concluded at 4:30 pm." Another situation in which you might want to use passive voice would be if you didn't know who did the action: "Some bones had been buried in our backyard, so we called Sherlock Holmes for help." In this sentence, the first half is in passive voice, because we don't know who buried the bones. However, the second half of the sentence is in active voice, because we do know who called Sherlock Holmes. (If your professor insisted, though, you could change the sentence to active voice by saying, "Someone buried some bones in our backyard, so we called Sherlock Holmes.")
Professors like active voice because it generally produces shorter, clearer sentences. In active voice, you find out more quickly who is doing what, which makes it easier for the reader to follow what you're writing. So here are some tricks to help you catch passive voice in your papers:
1) Ask yourself if it's clear who or what is doing the verb in your sentences.
2) Check to make sure that the person or thing doing the action is mentioned before the verb.
3) Keep an eye out for forms of the verb "to be," such as "is," "was," "has," "are," "were," etc. If there is a "to be" verb in your sentence AND an action verb (such as "written," "milked," "concluded," or "buried"), that's a hint that you may have written a sentence in passive voice.
If you find a passive voice sentence lurking in your paper, rearrange it so the person doing the action is at the beginning of the sentence. That might require you to figure out who is doing the action in the first place, but figuring out specifics like that can only help your paper. For practice, you can help me fix my title, because I wrote this about passive voice.