Popularized by Marine Corps University provost Rebecca Johnson, it’s a simple rule of thumb for identifying the passive voice. Try adding by zombies after the verb in your sentence. If it makes ...

Use the passive voice when you don’t know who is doing an action, or to emphasise that an action is being done to something or someone, rather than focusing on who or what is doing the action.

A tweet from The New York Times about protests over the weekend attracted criticism for, of all things, its use of the passive voice ... officer,” in the middle of the sentence, muffled by ...

1. The voice of the verb is distinct from its tense. Don't confuse the passive voice with the past tense. (Sentence 2 happens to be in the past tense, but 3 is not; both 2 and 3 are in the passive ...

the writing expert never gave a definition of passive voice. She just assumed readers understand it’s almost any sentence with “is,” “was,” “were” or “are.” “Now, I’m not ...

After reading the short definition of passive voice above, you should be able to easily detect it in the second sentence — “being destroyed” being the clue. When writing, we often slip into ...

They use the passive to bad-mouth the passive ... may diverge from the optimal flow of ideas in the reader’s mind. A sentence’s first words should link back to the preceding discussion ...

One is that it can obscure who did what in a sentence. Barack Obama said recently that “There is no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been,” the passive voice hiding who ...

Microsoft Word 2010 can help punch up your document's prose by alerting you when you use passive voice in a sentence. If you write "the goal was achieved" instead of the more active "we achieved ...

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 ...

We refer to a sentence as being in the "active voice" when the subject is performing the action of the sentence (the verb). A sentence is in the "passive voice" when the subject is being acted upon by ...