Active voice is when the subject performs an action on the object, while passive voice reverses the subject and object. Active verbs are more descriptive and focused. Transitive verbs are the only ones that have a voice. Passive verbs often use “to be” and have a preposition. Progressive conjugation can also be used in active voice. Implied passive verbs can also create confusion.
Active voice is a term used to identify a style of using verbs in the English language. When a verb is considered active, the subject of the verb performs some action on the object. The alternative is considered the passive voice, where the subject and object are reversed and the subject receives the action. In this way, active verbs are often seen as more vibrant and descriptive than their passive alternatives, and give the subject of a sentence just the right amount of focus.
Transitive verbs – verbs whose subjects require an object to form a complete sentence – are the only type of verb capable of having a voice. In the example sentence, “Jane slapped Tommy,” the verb “slapped” is used in the active voice to show what action Jane took on Tommy. Alternatively, in the passive voice, “Tommy was slapped by Jane,” comes out longer and changes the focus of the sentence from Jane to Tommy.
Given the simple examples above, a few notable aspects of the active voice emerge. In most cases, passive verbs are a form of the verb “to be”, such as “is, was, were, been”. If a reader looks for one of these inflections, he can quickly reveal whether the sentence uses active or passive voice. Sentences, or sentence clauses, written in the active voice also remove a preposition, which reduces overly verbose sentences from a particular composition. Converting a passive sentence into one in the active voice, then, is often a matter of swapping the subject and object, removing the verb ‘to be’ and its associated preposition, and giving the subject a verb that describes what it is doing to the object.
There are cases, however, where the verb “to be” will be found in sentences using the active voice. Consider the example sentence “Tommy pulled Jane’s hair.” In what is called progressive conjugation, the verb “to be” can be used with the present participle of a verb still showing the subject performing the action. Using the progressive conjugation, the above example would then become “Tommy is pulling Jane’s hair”. Both sentences show the action Tommy, the subject, is performing on Jane, even though the second sentence uses an inflection of “to be”.
Progressive conjugation isn’t the only way passive and active voice might be confused. Sometimes, the passive verb is implicit in a sentence. Take, for example, the line, “Jane’s slap taught Tommy a valuable lesson.” There is an implied “that was”, which if written before the verb “given”, would make the sentence excessively verbose. Even if the inflection of “to be” doesn’t actually appear in the sentence, its implication still gives the sentence clause a passive voice.
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