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 ...

Of all the technical advice I offer writers, none is more controversial than encouragement to use the passive voice. Most writers prefer the active, and so do I. But that preference has been distorted ...

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 ...

If you’ve ever had any writing training, either at school or on the job, you’ve probably been warned off the passive voice. Your high school English teacher, all the business writing books, and scores ...

You have probably heard about active and passive voice, and you may have been told never to use the passive voice, but we’re here to tell you that both can work in different ways. Active voice is ...

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 ...

In most writing, active voice is preferred. In active voice, the subject performs the action. Ex: The cow jumped over the moon. In passive voice, the subject is passive; it performs no action. The ...

The active and passive voice are different ways of structuring the same information in a sentence. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence comes first and performs the action (the verb). The ...