Use the passive voice when you don’t know who is ... rather than focusing on who or what is doing the action. For example: Le bâtiment a été construit en 1990. – The building was built ...

As an example of the passive voice I offer the following sentence: “The dog was hit by a car.” I then ask students to make it active: “A car hit the dog.” It is usually clear that the second sentence ...

In English, there are two voices--active and passive. If the subject of a sentence performs the action of the verb, the verb is said to be in the "active voice"; for example: I stopped. I bathed. The ...

Those examples are sentences in the active voice with the doer (person or thing doing the action) as their subject. The object or thing being acted on is the subject of a sentence in the passive ...

If it makes sense, congratulations! You’ve probably got yourself some passive voice. For example: Popular grammar guides have contributed both to what linguist Geoff Pullum calls the “fear and ...

To choose between active and passive voice, consider above all what you are discussing (your topic) and place it in the subject position. For example, should you write "The preprocessor sorts the ...

As I said above, it is appropriate to use the passive voice when it clarifies your meaning. Here is an appropriate example: "In the past three decades, interest in the discipline of communication has ...

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 passive voice is the marked voice ... The implication is in the \semantics. In (18), for example, the theme is required, but the agent is optional. In semantics there is always an agent, even if ...