How to use the passive voice to sound more. - BBC Bitesize.
Sentences in active voice are often shorter than their passive-voice counterparts. Cut the fluff and tighten your prose with active voice. When to Use Passive Voice. That said, you’ll encounter occasions in your writing when the passive voice is actually a better choice than the active voice. Here are three times you should use passive voice: 1.
According to scholars, the general opinion is that the passive voice makes writing flat and insinuates evasion of responsibility in writing of any form, not just scientific writing. In fact, some scholars have actually shown that active voice was the preferred form till the beginning of the 20 th century when the trend of objectivity became favored.
Active voice means that a sentence has a subject that acts upon its verb.Passive voice means that a subject is a recipient of a verb’s action. You may have learned that the passive voice is weak and incorrect, but it isn’t that simple. When used correctly and in moderation, the passive voice is fine.
The passive voice shouldn’t be accustomed to avoid writing I or we. When the entire thesis is presented within the passive voice, it’s more difficult to see, and also the sentences there 1 need to be reworded awkwardly to ensure that good quality transitions between your sentences inside a paragraph are lost.
If it is a formal text, then using the passive voice can increase the sense of formality. Also, if the OP has already written a lot of their text in the active voice, they might just want to switch it up for variety's sake (or at least know how to).
In all passive sentences, the subject of the sentence has an action done upon them. The following are passive voice examples: Sheila was persuaded to move to New York.; Esteban has been given three choices for his next assignment.; We were driven to the writing center by our teacher.; I will be asked to complete several physical challenges.; Much like active sentence construction, passive.
In scientific writing, however, passive voice is more readily accepted since using it allows one to write without using personal pronouns or the names of particular researchers as the subjects of sentences (see the third example above). This practice helps to create the appearance of an objective, fact-based discourse because writers can.