32g Use active and passive voice effectively.
Voice tells whether a subject is acting (He questions us) or being acted upon (He is questioned). When the subject is acting, the verb is in the active voice; when the subject is being acted upon, the verb is in the passive voice. Most contemporary writers use the active voice as much as possible because it livens up their writing.
| PASSIVE | Huge pine trees were uprooted by the storm. |
| ACTIVE | The storm uprooted huge pine trees. |
The passive voice can work to good advantage in some situations. Newspaper reporters often use the passive voice to protect the confidentiality of their sources, as in the familiar expression it is reported that. You can also use the passive voice when you want to emphasize the recipient of an action rather than the performer of the action.
Dallas, Nov. 22—President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.
– Tom Wicker, New York Times
Wicker uses the passive voice with good reason: to focus on Kennedy, not on who killed him.
To shift a sentence from passive to active voice, make the performer of the action the subject of the sentence.
Technical and Scientific Writing
TALKING ABOUT STYLE
Much technical and scientific writing uses the passive voice effectively to highlight what is being studied rather than who is doing the studying.
The Earth’s plates are created where they separate and are recycled where they collide, in a continuous process of creation and destruction.
– Frank Press and Raymond Siever, Understanding Earth