Whether you write on a part- or full-time basis, you can benefit from becoming more familiar with an often-overlooked aspect of writing that is treated in today’s column: active and passive voice ...

You probably learned it in one of your earliest writing classes: Active voice means the grammatical subject is doing the acting, and passive voice means the subject is acted upon. It is the difference ...

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 ...

So, you’ve gotten your graded essay back, and you weren’t exactly content with the results. Perhaps you’ve gone through the in-line comments that your GSI left you, or perhaps you’re wondering what ...

Of all the technical advice I offer writers, none is more controversial than encouragement to use the passive voice. Most writers prefer the active, and so do I. But that preference has been distorted ...

Teaching students to write in the active voice will significantly strengthen their essays because sentences written in the active voice often have much more impact than those written in the passive ...

I blogged a short while ago about some people’s tendency to mislabel usages they dislike as “passive voice.” But even phrases that really are in the passive voice are often better than their ...