Whats an active voice how to#

How to tell when writing uses the active or passive voice Passive voice = when the subject receives an action, instead of being described as doing the action itself. ( Wikipedia)Ī quick trick to remember the difference between writing in the passive and active voice is the following:Īctive voice = action = someone doing an action. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. ( Wikipedia)Ī passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages.

It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages. FormĪctive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world’s languages. The passive voice, on the other hand, describes the subject as receiving the action in a sentence, and so they are the passive subject in the sense that they passively receive the action. This means that when writing in the active voice, there is an active subject, or the subject is doing the action. The active voice describes writing in the present, or actively describes the subject in the sentence doing the sentence action or verb. English has multiple tenses ( which refer to the time at which the action was done, and helps us differentiate between whether the action referred to was in the past, present or future tense).

Whats an active voice