active passive voice answers study island

Jane Austen is a master of poking fun at her characters so euphemistically that it seems almost polite, and the passive voice is one of her favorite methods for doing that. Here are some uses for the passive voice as a stylistic decision that suits the author’s writing goals. The above examples show some common uses of the passive voice, but some writers and speakers take advantage of the shift in emphasis it provides for other reasons. Passive: Bob Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident.Īctive: A motorcycle accident injured Bob Dylan.Īctive: Don’t allow anything to fool you! Creative ways to use the passive voice in writing

Rewriting these sentences in the active voice renders them sterile, awkward, or syntactically contorted. In each of the sentences below, the passive voice is natural and clear for one of the reasons in the list above. Although some of these examples are formal, others show that the passive voice is often useful and necessary in daily life.

That means the performer of the action can be absent from the sentence altogether or appear in a prepositional phrase with by. In each of the above contexts, the action itself-or the person or thing receiving the action-is the part that matters. So making the recipient of the action ( Cleo) the subject of the sentence, using the passive voice, and tucking the performer of the action ( the experience) after the action as the object of the preposition by makes sense.

But the thing the sentence most urgently wants us to know is that a person, Cleo, had an important thing happen to them. In this case, we know what brought about the action: It was the experience of traveling alone in South America. Cleo was transformed by the experience of traveling alone in Latin America.

Active passive voice answers study island