Passive Voice

Nine times out of ten, the Active Voice is superior to the Passive Voice.

The Active emphasizes, you know, ACTION: Feeding and Eating.

The Passive de-emphasizes just about everything. Still, it functions well when the Doer of the Action is unknown, or when the writer of the sentence wants to hide the identify of the Doer of the Action.

The Doer of the Action Is Unknown	The Author Wishes to Hide the Doer’s Identity	The Action is More Crucial than the Doer.
The value of good nutrition has been demonstrated time and again.	The only statement the PR firm is willing to make is that mistakes were made.	Within hours after the storm, most sidewalks had been shoveled.

Emphasizing the Action: In contracts, in legislation, and in very formal writing, authors give doers lower priority than actions. After all, “monies shall be reimbursed from the account” is more important than which clerk does the reimbursing.

De-Emphasizing the Doer: Academic and scientific journals frown on personal pronouns as a way to remove hints of bias or personal conjecture. They will publish “It was observed that the rats gave up struggling” and decline to publish “Experimenters concluded that the rats gave up struggling.” The mention of experimenter conclusions weakens the scientific claim. It turns a fact: “Rats gave up” into a conjecture: “We figure they gave up.”

Use the Active in Less Formal Writing. Your class Notes, your Replies to feedback, your Essays for this class, are less formal than scientific papers but more formal than online chat or conversations with your friends. They should strive for the immediacy and approachability of good newspaper or magazine articles.

Passive Class Notes

Active Class Notes

—1. Having the capability to communicate with the Professor is absolutely crucial when it comes to the level of success that one might be looking for in their class. —2. Being able to contact your teacher through email, text, phone calls, etc. will help students flourish and do their work to the best of their abilities. —3. This blog is going to be used as a substitute for canvas. Canvas will only be used for grading. —4. It is really important to have an anonymous username because responses to whatever you have posted will be an honest reaction to your work. —5. There was also a video from David Wallace that was put on for the class to watch. This video connected to the class showing how this course will force students to take a deeper look into the analysis of life’s truths. —6. There is also a hypothesis assignment due on January 28th. The purpose of this assignment is to create a hypothesis that can be used to take ideas and create even more theories with them. This assignment is to help the writer create even deeper connections than what they may have first thought of. —7. There is also a take-home task that is due on January 21st. The task consists of watching a 4-minute long video on rhetoric. Rhetoric encourages audience participation and can help inform these audiences about what the author believes. This assignment is due by 12.

—1. We will succeed by communicating with our Professor. —2. Students who contact the teacher through email, text, phone calls, etc. will flourish and do their best work. —3. Except for grading, we will use the blog as a substitute for Canvas. —4. Anonymous usernames will protect us from the embarrassment of seeing honest reactions to our work in feedback. —5. Professor played a video from David Foster Wallace that demonstrated how this course will force students to take a deeper look into the analysis of life’s truths. —6. We’ll submit our “My Hypothesis” posts by January 28th. We’ll start by naming broad topic and then gradually narrow that topic to a more specific Hypothesis that shows a deeper connection to our material than we showed in the first steps. —7. The take-home task due on January 21st consists of analyzing the rhetoric of a 4-minute long video. Rhetoric encourages audience participation and informs these readers or viewers about what the author believes.

In-Class Exercise

In a Reply to this page, convert as many of the Passive Voice examples as you can to Active Voice. In some cases, the Doer of the Action will not be obvious, but you may be able to make a conversion regardless. Take license in rephrasing anything that results in better sentences. Your goal is a paragraph without Passives.

THE PASSIVES PARAGRAPH:

It was said by Professor Hodges that our Notes should not be written in passive voice. We were also told that he had been warned by the University that we would be penalized with grade reductions for presenting work that had been written or assisted by AI. When all of our Notes had been posted and had been reviewed by our professor, we would be given a chance to make revisions to the drafts that had been submitted. His claim that the prohibition against passives had been issued by the Writing Arts Department was met with skepticism by all the students to whom it was made.