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 ...

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 ...

You probably learned it in one of your earliest writing classes: Active voice means the grammatical subject is doing the acting, and passive voice means the subject is acted upon. It is the difference ...

"We applied an external magnetic field of 4 T while increasing the pressure to 300 kPa." or "An external magnetic field of 4 T was applied as the pressure was increased to 300 kPa." Which is the ...

Even when you think you’ve got a handle on grammar, you might not realize how easy it is easy to unwittingly venture into lexical territory that would rile your freshman year English teacher.

The passive voice focuses more on an action that took place and places less importance on the person who performed the action. Writers who use passive voice may cause headaches and frustration among ...

Both sentence pairs make sense. Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend ...

Both sentence pairs make sense. Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend ...

Please reset the permissions and let me know when you’re finished so I can retest.” In this case, the passive voice states the problem without addressing who caused the problem. The action needed 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 ...