Whether you write on a part- or full-time basis, you can benefit from becoming more familiar with an often-overlooked aspect of writing that is treated in today’s column: active and passive voice ...

This handout is also available for download in PDF format. We refer to a sentence as being in the "active voice" when the subject is performing the action of the sentence (the verb). A sentence is in ...

The passive voice focuses more on an action that took place and places less importance on the person who performed the action. Writers who use passive voice may cause headaches and frustration among ...

How to find and rewrite instances of passive voice in your Microsoft Word documents Your email has been sent Passive speech is awkward and sometimes hard to understand. Let Word find your passive ...

The great thing about being a grammar expert is you don’t have to know anything about grammar to be one. Just launch a blog, say whatever you think is true and bask in the certainty that no one will ...

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 ...

So, you’ve gotten your graded essay back, and you weren’t exactly content with the results. Perhaps you’ve gone through the in-line comments that your GSI left you, or perhaps you’re wondering what ...

50 years after its publication, Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" still influences our thinking about language, particularly our disapproval of the passive voice. But our linguist Geoff Nunberg ...