![]() ![]() This passive sentence may be forcing a distant, emotionless prose style for the sake of sounding objective, but in some ways it loses its power by sandwiching the real action of the sentence, the verb “consider,” between two forms of the “to be” verb (“is” and “to be”). “The burning of books is considered to be censorship by some people” may be trying too hard. Don’t write actively if your readers shouldn’t know who’s kicking the ball. ![]() Don’t write passively just to up the word count. Your choice of active or passive voice–or a combination of the two–does a lot for the readability of your writing. You’ll often hear that active is “better” if you want to write concisely or “crisply,” or that passive is the only way to write “formal papers” for scholarly audiences because it “sounds more academic.” While there are arguments to be made for claims like this, choosing to write in the active or passive voice is ultimately the writer’s decision, and that decision should be made by deciding what to emphasize (or deemphasize, as the case may be). The CEO who says “mistakes were made” in a press conference knows exactly what he or she is doing (compare this to “I made a mistake”), as does the scientist who writes “the rats were dissected” (instead of “I dissected the rats. Here's a key takeaway: writing in the active voice or the passive voice is, at least in part, a rhetorical decision. In the last three examples the subject is delayed to the end or the middle of the sentence, again, perhaps, for emphasis-the fact that “I was invited to the dance,” I’m telling my readers, is the first thing I want you to know (sorry, Jane!). ![]() did you kick the ball? Did I finish the paper? More than likely the writer wasn’t interested in who did the action what matters is the action itself, so the sentence focuses all its emphasis on the verb construction (was kicked) and the object (the ball). Here, our first two examples don’t even mention who is doing the action. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Solar Thermal Technology Program” (Alley 126).
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