One "rule" that many self-appointed experts on writing return to again and again is: "Don't use the passive!" Or, as some puckishly put it, "The passive voice should be avoided." The passive voice is ...

The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing, blamed ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing. In his new ...

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 ...

Research into grammar suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences. The findings - which undermine the assumption that all speakers ...

In English, we can express sentences in two different ways: active voice and passive voice. The active voice is used when the focus is on the subject (or agent) of the main verb. This is the person or ...

How to find and rewrite instances of passive voice in your Microsoft Word documents Your email has been sent Passive speech is awkward and sometimes hard to understand. Let Word find your passive ...