Matthew Adams breaks down the difference between the active and passive voice, including which is better. Plus, Adams shares ...

The passive voice is an important grammatical structure that appears in every form of written and spoken English. Knowledge of this construction is vital for reading and writing English in everyday ...

In the exercise below, you are to distinguish between true passive voice constructions and stative passive constructions. After reading each sentence, record your choice by clicking on either the word ...

Voice is a complex issue, but it appears to mark a prominent object that the speaker chooses to make prominent. In English there are two voices: active and passive. The passive voice is the marked ...

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 ...

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 ...

Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend on what tone you wanted to ...

Like the plain passive-voice construction ... This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column "English Plain and Simple" in The Manila Times, subsequently became Chapter 67 of my book ...