For many writers, feedback that your copy is "too passive" can be frustrating. The passive voice is, after all, grammatically correct. But there's a reason that public relations and communications ...

People who give advice on copywriting often say, “Avoid using the passive voice.” This universal statement is not always correct but, more importantly, it is often confusing because most of us use ...

A MEMBER of Jose Carrillo’s Forum who goes by the user name Baklis asked me this tough question recently: “How does the perfect tense in the passive voice differ from the perfect tense in the active ...

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 ...

When you can’t properly situate or correlate different actions or events as they happen in time, it’s symptomatic of an inadequate grasp of the perfect tenses in the passive voice. This was evidently ...

Regarding the April 27 Bilingual page article, "Stop worrying and embrace the passive tense": Sorry to nitpick, but I think someone writing a column on language is obliged to be careful about ...

perfect j’ai été, tu as été, il a été, nous avons été, vous avez été, ils ont été imperfect j’étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions, vous étiez, ils étaient near future je vais être, tu vas être, ...

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 ...

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 ...