Hello
today i'm going to post about the passive voice and how difficult is use it, for me.
So, I know how to create a sentences in passive voice acording to the tenses and all about that, but what make me difficult is how to know when to use active voice or passive voice and in what circustances? I think other students are making this question too,
It really drives me crazy when people write in passive voice So I was surfing in the net when i found that
"Passive voice isn't wrong, but it's often a poor way to present your thoughts"
Is Passive Voice Always Wrong?
Another important point is that passive sentences aren't incorrect; it’s just that they often aren't the best way to phrase your thoughts. Sometimes passive voice is awkward and other times it’s vague. Also, passive voice is usually wordy, so you can tighten your writing if you replace passive sentences with active sentence.
When you put sentences in passive voice, it's easy to leave out the person or thing doing the action. For example, "Amy is loved," is passive. The problem with that sentence is that you don't know who loves Amy.
Politicians often use passive voice to intentionally obscure the idea of who is taking the action. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Mistakes were made,” when referring to the Iran-Contra scandal. Other examples of passive voice for political reasons could include “Bombs were dropped,” and “Shots were fired.” Pay attention to the news and listen for examples of passive voice.
Also, a reader named Matthew commented that businesses sometimes use passive voice. He notes that it sounds better to write, "Your electricity will be shut off," than "We, the electric company, will be shutting off your power."
Is Passive Voice Hard to Understand?
A recent study suggests that less educated people--those who dropped out of school when they were 16--have a harder time understanding sentences written in the passive voice than those written in active voice. I only had access to the press release, not the original study, but the results made it seem as if you should stick with active voice if you're writing for the general population.
When You Should Use Passive Voice
Is Passive Voice OK in Crime Reports?
On the other hand, sometimes passive voice does have advantages. For example, if you truly don’t know who is taking the action, then you can’t name the person. This is especially common with crime reports. For example, a security guard might write "The store was robbed," because nobody knows who the robber was.
Can Passive Voice Work in Fiction Writing?
Passive voice is also sometimes useful in fiction writing. For example, if you were writing a mystery novel and you wanted to highlight missing cookies because they are central to the story, passive voice is the best option. It would make more sense to write, "The cookies were stolen," instead of "Somebody stole the cookies."
The difference is subtle, but in the passive sentence “The cookies were stolen,” the focus is on the cookies. In “Somebody stole the cookies,” the focus would be on the unknown somebody.
Passive voice can be helpful if you want to create a sense of mystery in your sentence, which is also a reason that it's not usually a good choice when you're writing nonfiction and you want your writing to be clear.
Why Is Passive Voice Recommended for Science Writing?
An exception is that scientists are often encouraged to write in passive voice to lend their writing a sense of objectivity--to take themselves and their actions and opinions out of the experimental results. I used to be a scientist and I always found that odd. It felt as if we were trying to hide that real people did the experiments.
Some scientific style guides do allow for a limited use of active voice (1). For example, it may be OK to write, "We sequenced the DNA," instead of "The DNA was sequenced," but it's still considered bad for scientists to insert themselves into conclusions. For example, it would be bad scientific form to write "We believe the mutation causes cancer." But you still don't need passive voice to achieve your goals. For example, the active sentence "We believe the mutation causes cancer," could be changed to "The data suggests that the mutation causes cancer." That's still active, but it eliminates the sense of subjectivity.
this quotation made me laugh but Now i realize where or in what case i can use tha passive voice, i hope you enjoy reading and let me know if this was happened to you too?
+20.15.41.png)
+18.42.43.png)
