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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...

I blogged a short while ago about some people’s tendency to mislabel usages they dislike as “passive voice.” But even phrases that really are in the passive voice are often better than their ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Laura Brown writes about business communication. If you’ve ever had any writing training, either at school or on the job, you’ve ...

William Germano finds it ironic that academics warn their students off the passive voice while peppering their own writing with that construction (“Passive Is Spoken Here,” The Chronicle Review, April ...

Does the passive voice lend itself to biased, manipulative writing? A reader named Richard wanted to know after witnessing a discussion about a news article. “Someone criticized an article on politics ...

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 ...