There were a great number of dead leaves covering the ground.ĭespite what any well-meaning English teachers may have told you, none of the sentences above are written in the passive voice. The bank robbery took place just before closing time. Even the most careful eye can mistake the following sentences for being in passive voice. Sometimes what looks like passive voice isn’t passive voice at all. It makes sense that a statement declaring independence would focus on the citizens who get that independence, after all. “All men” (these days, we take this to mean all people) gets boosted to the front of the phrase because the people and their equality and rights are the focus. “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” - The Declaration of Independence This is like the grass getting cut or the president being sworn in: The recipient of the action of the verb is more important than the performer of the action. In this specific case, Austen’s use of the passive also abets her gentle humor and vivid characterization. In cases like this, the passive voice allows for more polite phrasing, even if it’s also a little less clear. Middleton repeated his invitations beyond the point of politeness and into pushiness, but he meant well and they didn’t feel they could say “no.”

Though maybe she means something closer to: Middleton carried his entreaties to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they could not give offense. pressed them so cordially to dine at Barton Park every day till they were better settled at home that, though his entreaties were carried to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they could not give offense.” -Jane Austen, Sense and SensibilityĪusten could have rephrased this sentence like so: Jane Austen is a master of poking fun at her characters so euphemistically that it seems almost polite, and the passive voice is one of her favorite methods for doing that. Here are some uses for the passive voice as a stylistic decision that suits the author’s writing goals. The above examples show some common uses of the passive voice, but some writers and speakers take advantage of the shift in emphasis it provides for other reasons. Passive: Bob Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident.Īctive: A motorcycle accident injured Bob Dylan.Īctive: Don’t allow anything to fool you! Creative ways to use the passive voice in writing Rewriting these sentences in the active voice renders them sterile, awkward, or syntactically contorted. In each of the sentences below, the passive voice is natural and clear for one of the reasons in the list above. Although some of these examples are formal, others show that the passive voice is often useful and necessary in daily life.

That means the performer of the action can be absent from the sentence altogether or appear in a prepositional phrase with by. In each of the above contexts, the action itself-or the person or thing receiving the action-is the part that matters. So making the recipient of the action ( Cleo) the subject of the sentence, using the passive voice, and tucking the performer of the action ( the experience) after the action as the object of the preposition by makes sense. But the thing the sentence most urgently wants us to know is that a person, Cleo, had an important thing happen to them. In this case, we know what brought about the action: It was the experience of traveling alone in South America. Cleo was transformed by the experience of traveling alone in Latin America.

Active v passive voice