In English, there are two voices--active and passive. If the subject of a sentence performs the action of the verb, the verb is said to be in the "active voice"; for example: I stopped. I bathed. The ...

When is it appropriate to use the passive voice? As I said above, it is appropriate to use the passive voice when it clarifies your meaning. Here is an appropriate example: "In the past three decades, ...

The passive voice is the marked voice: [+Passive], and the active voice is the unmarked or ... The implication is in the \semantics. In (18), for example, the theme is required, but the agent is ...

One way to avoid using the passive voice is to look for a ‘by’ phrase. Rewrite the sentence so that the subject in the 'by' phrase is closer to the beginning of the sentence. For example ...

Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend on what tone you wanted to ...

To choose between active and passive voice, consider above all what you are discussing (your topic) and place it in the subject position. For example, should you write "The preprocessor sorts the ...

One major function of the passive voice is ... To see how true this is, let's go back to the example of the active-voice sentence we used above: "Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat." ...