ACTIVE VOICE VERB FREE

There will be a discussion of the report by the project team. The process has been changed by the board. See if you can use one of the methods above to identify the active and passive voices.

Here are some examples of passive voice changed to active voice.

ACTIVE VOICE VERB FREE

Hemingway Editor is a free online tool that will highlight your passive sentences. If you enable it (by going to the File > Options > Proofing menu) it will highlight passive voice as you write. If you struggle to identify the voice of a verb, try using a grammar checker like the one built into Microsoft Word. ‘The press release was sent at 6pm yesterday.’ Passive voice is fine because either it’s obvious that the communications team sent or, or our readers don’t need to know. When the agent is obvious or your readers really don’t need to know who it is ‘Over 100 contaminants have been dumped into the river.’ Passive voice is appropriate because we don’t know who has done this. To de-emphasise an unknown or unimportant agent ‘100 votes are required to pass the bill.’ The passive voice emphasises the number of votes. There are three main reasons for choosing the passive over the active voice. In this example, ‘was’ is the auxilliary verb, and ‘approved’ is the past participle. Note that the tense (past, present, future) of the auxilliary verb is not relevant.

past participles are verbs that end in ‘ed’ or ‘en’, although irregular verbs have no pattern to help recognise the past participle.

auxiliary verbs are usually a form of the verb ‘to be’ (am, are, is, was, were, been, being).

The passive voice uses an auxiliary (helper) verb with a past participle. But if you can add the phrase ‘by the agent’ after the verb, the voice is passive. In this example, the agent isn’t mentioned. In the passive voice, the agent appears after the verb: verb > agentĮxample: ‘The program was approved by the committee’ (or ‘The program was approved’). Here, the verb is ‘approved’ and the agent is ‘the committee’. In the active voice, the agent appears before the verb: agent > verbĮxample: ‘The committee approved the program’ (or ‘The committee approved’). In formal grammar, the agent is known as the ‘subject’, but I find this often confuses people.

Note the position of the agent (a person, group or thing) doing the verb.

There may be more than one, so you’ll need to check the others too

Find the verb (action, doing word) in your sentence.

You can identify the verb voice from the structure of the sentence, or if you’re more familiar with grammar, by the use of certain verb forms.

Active voice verb