The Storytellers : Forum : Passive Voice and its many for..


[reply] [quote]

Re: Passive Voice and its many forms!

13 Years Ago


Is there more to this, Kristina?  It seems like there should be more.  I don't really understand passive voice, so it's hard for me to avoid it.
[reply] [quote]

Re: Passive Voice and its many forms!

13 Years Ago


here Jim maybe this will help. I have this tiny book, and it is kind of humorous in a grammatical sort of way, unfortunately it didn't stick and i have to read it again but it is good. The Elements of Style by E.B. White and William Strunk
Two years later, in 1918, in The Elements of Style Cornell University Professor of English William Strunk, Jr. warned against excessive use of the passive voice:
The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive . . . This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary . . . The need to make a particular word the subject of the sentence will often . . . determine which voice is to be used. The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative concerned principally with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.[7]
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