Active vs passive voice sentences how to#
Active vs passive voice sentences series#

In contrast, passive voice is a sentence structure where the noun doing the acting with the verb is not the subject of the sentence: Who’s doing the eating? She is, and she’s the subject of the sentence, so the sentence is in active voice. Those are examples of active voice because the noun in the subject of the sentence is the one doing the acting with the verb. The next level of complexity is to add an object, a “what” for the verb to act on: First, let’s start with the basics… What Is Passive Voice?īasic sentences in the English language are constructed with a subject and a verb: And sometimes it does make sense to write in passive voice, but we’ll get to that later. Every aspect of the English language, from adverbs and slang to future tense and passive voice, has its place in our writing-craft toolbox. That said, I won’t go so far as to call passive voice bad. They make actions clearer, help with showing our story, and are just plain easier to read. What is passive voice and how can it cause problems in our story? Click To TweetSentences in active voice are, well…more active for readers. And yes, that advice usually applies to story writing too.

In school, we might have heard that passive voice is bad or to be avoided.

Active vs passive voice sentences how to#

Let’s talk about what passive voice is and how to tell when the word was is not a sign of passive voice. Yay for another great idea for a post! *smile* Especially as I’ve haven’t talked much about passive voice here. It’s one of my pet peeves that editors and other authors too often assume that “I was eating” is passive voice.

“Perhaps in some future post, you could clarify more about the past continuous tense. In the comments of that post, Kassandra Lamb (a frequent guest poster here) brought up another verb tense that often causes issues: Last time, we talked about the past perfect verb tense and how it helps us indicate to readers that a story event happened before the past tense of our novel.

Active vs passive voice sentences series#

I wasn’t intending on doing a series on various grammar points, but… People have been bringing up common misunderstandings in the comments, so I’m still here, appreciating all the post ideas.