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 ...

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 ...

For many writers, feedback that your copy is "too passive" can be frustrating. The passive voice is, after all, grammatically correct. But there's a reason that public relations and communications ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Laura Brown writes about business communication. If you’ve ever had any writing training, either at school or on the job, you’ve ...

Does the passive voice lend itself to biased, manipulative writing? A reader named Richard wanted to know after witnessing a discussion about a news article. “Someone criticized an article on politics ...

The passive voice focuses more on an action that took place and places less importance on the person who performed the action. Writers who use passive voice may cause headaches and frustration among ...

Both sentence pairs make sense. 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 ...