If you’ve gone through life believing the passive voice should be put in a box and placed in the corner of an uncomfortably moist basement never to see the light of day, I have some shocking news. The ...

PITY the passive voice. No feature of the grammar of English has such a bad reputation. Style guides, including that of The Economist, as well as usage books like the celebrated American “Elements of ...

Whether you write on a part- or full-time basis, you can benefit from becoming more familiar with an often-overlooked aspect of writing that is treated in today’s column: active and passive voice ...

50 years after its publication, Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" still influences our thinking about language, particularly our disapproval of the passive voice. But our linguist Geoff Nunberg ...

Teaching students to write in the active voice will significantly strengthen their essays because sentences written in the active voice often have much more impact than those written in the passive ...

Passive and active voice simply refer to the relationship of the subject to the verb. In a sentence using the active voice, the subject of the sentence (doer) performs the action described by the verb ...

When the subject of a sentence isn't doing something, the verb is passive. On the other hand, a sentence is active when the subject performs the verb (action). For example, in this sentence the verb ...

“Avoid the passive voice” is a favorite maxim of writing teachers. But for young learners, exposure to passive construction—and other more complex sentences in spoken language—may help children ...