http://blog.robgarrett.com/2005/09/19/passive-voice-in-professional-documents/ Software and Technology Tid-bits Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:06:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://blog.robgarrett.com/2005/09/19/passive-voice-in-professional-documents/#comment-243 Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:30:00 +0000 /cs/blogs/software/archive/2005/09/19/passive-voice-in-professional-documents.aspx#comment-243 Wow, I am glad my crusade against passive voice is catching on! Passive voice is “any form of the verb ‘to be’ followed by any other verb.” Passive voice causes confusion because, in most cases, there is no subject in the sentence. There is an action and the object that is the target of the action, but no one is doing the action. Your list shows some common scenarios of active voice (a form of be + verb). However, the word "were" is not by itself passive voice. Consider the following sentence:
<br>
<br>&quot;We were 10 years old.&quot;
<br>
<br>This is not passive voice. Now, consider this:
<br>
<br>&quot;The papers were written by programmers.&quot;
<br>
<br>This is passive voice. This sentence is poor style because the reader sees a story in reverse. First, the reader is lead to believe that the papers are doing something. Then, the reader finds out that the papers are actually the target of the verb. Someone wrote the papers. Who wrote the papers? Only after reading the entire sentence does the reader understand that “programmers wrote the papers.” The following is a similar example of passive voice (with no subject).
<br>
<br>“The papers were written last Monday.”

]]>