By objectivity I mean not using personal pronouns in a lab report and not speculating about who committed a crime.
Some writing, such as scientific and judicial writing, places a particularly high value on objectivity. With the possible exception of the middle pair (depending on the context), I prefer the passive versions of these sentences. Passive: The toaster should be cleaned monthly.Īctive: You should clean the toaster monthly. Passive: My brother was diagnosed with cancer.Īctive: Doctors diagnosed my brother with cancer. If you want to emphasize the object, or if the subject is irrelevant or unknown, using the passive voice is better. Sometimes the doer (the subject in an active sentence) is not the most important person around. We made mistakes.), but not all passive sentences are so terrible. These sentences should definitely be revised (I visited my mother. Passive sentences are often clunky, and they can be ambiguous if you don’t indicate the agent (the thing that’s doing the action). Just like proponents of healthy lifestyles, writing instructors generally encourage (or even require) being active: choosing active verbs instead of passive ones. In contrast, a passive sentence has a subject that has the action done to it.Īs these examples show, when you change an active sentence into a passive one, the direct object becomes the subject.
Most English sentences are active, meaning they have a subject that is doing the action.
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