When should you use passive voice in writing? In general, try to write in the active voice wherever you can, unless you’ve examined the sentence in both active and passive voice and decided that the passive sentence is the better choice. He stumbled against a wall of cardboard boxes. “Suddenly, Jake punched Cole in the face. Cole’s vision was blurred by bright patches.”Ī bro’s getting beat on, and I’m yawning. Cardboard boxes were toppled by his fall. “Suddenly, Cole was punched in the face by Jake. If you’re writing a fight scene between two people, using the passive voice can give your writing a slow, dreamlike quality-not ideal for a scene where everything should be fast paced and vivid. One of the biggest places where active voice is essential in fiction writing is during action sequences. Scribophile is one the web’s largest writing communities. In academic, political, or scientific writing, active sentences make your facts and arguments sound more convincing.īecome the best writer you can be in our writing community Even if both present the same idea and are grammatically correct, sentences in active voice tend to make your writing flow more smoothly. Most of the time, it’s good practice to default to using active voice sentences in your writing. When should you use active voice in writing? The first is less direct and takes some of the responsibility off the speaker. The first example is a passive voice sentence, and the second is an active voice sentence. “We will make every effort to address your request.” “Every effort will be made” (by us) “to address your request in three business days.” But sometimes passive sentence structures are used when one wants to deflect responsibility from the object, or particularly emphasize the subject of a sentence. If we turn the above sentences into passive voice examples, they look like this:Ī lot of the time, these don’t even look like real English. Passive voice represents this on a smaller sentence-scale structure. In story structure, writers are encouraged to have their characters taking action rather than having the action simply happen to them. Often, this type of writing is discouraged because it tends to slow down a narrative. Passive voice flips these sentences around so that instead of the object doing something, something is being done to them. You could just say “She smiled,” or “They stepped outside,” and it would still be in the active voice. In each of these active voice examples, someone (that would be the object, in grammatical terms), takes an action (that would be your verb) towards something else-him, a hat, a street (this would be the grammatical subject of a sentence). (In passive voice, this would be written as “He was smiled at by her.” We’ll look more at passive voice next.)Īnd so forth. Here are a few examples of sentences in active voice: It means someone is taking a direct action towards a goal. This type of writing is direct, straightforward, and convincing. What is active voice?Īctive voice is a simple sentence structure that involves the object of a sentence-usually a person-doing something. However, there are instances in which the passive voice gives an extra dimension to a story. Most of the time, active voice is the better choice in writing. For example, “He gave her a new coat” is active voice, while “She was given a new coat” is passive voice. passive voice is that active voice describes someone doing something, while passive voice describes someone having something done to them.
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