Be Active!

 You've probably already heard plenty about active voice and passive voice. From what I remember from high school, a lot of my education consisted of people telling me to only use the active voice and avoid passive at all costs. But there is a place for passive voice, and it's important to recognize where each one is best utilized so your writing can be as effective as possible.

First, I should explain what I mean by active and passive voice. A sentence written with active voice will have a subject that is clearly the one doing the action. It uses verbs that show that action. Example: "The author explored themes of grief and mourning in this work." The "author" is the one doing the acting. "Explored" is an active verb. It can help to remember that active voice involves active verbs.

A sentence written in the passive voice does not have a clear actor. It contains verbs that show existence (am, are, is, were, etc.) or past-tense verb phrases (was found, had been observed, etc.) Example: "Themes of grief and mourning have been found in the author's work." In this version, we can't tell who found the themes. There is no clear subject doing the action.

In general, you should try to stick to active voice. It's more interesting and concise, since passive voice makes for wordier sentences. There are, however, a couple of cases in which you do want to use the passive voice. One of these cases is when the audience is expecting a more objective viewpoint. This shows up often in scientific texts. The audience doesn't care who made the discovery; they just want to know what the discovery is. If you use the passive voice, you can get the ones doing the action out of the way and focus on their action. The other case is when the actor is unknown, and you don't want to mislead your audience. This also applies for when you want to avoid accusing or offending someone by claiming that they did a certain action.

In short, both types of voice have their place. I hope this has helped you to recognize what those places are in your own writing and editing.

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