2/22/2024 0 Comments Writing in active voice![]() 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.Strong interpretive verbs and confident, accurate pronouncements automatically suggest that an "I" is at work anyway, so concentrate on choosing simple transitions, concrete nouns, and muscular verbs.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. Remember that your focus is on information and your considered interpretation of that information. Simple transition words can represent the writer’s thinking just as well as the use of "I." For instance, the word "apparently" can do the same job as "I believe that" the word "however" is much better than "as I turn to another way of thinking about it." Also, using "I" can be distracting, especially because it might cause you to inject too much personal opinion or irrelevant subjectivity-technical papers are not the place to share digressive speculations or assert your personality. One cautionary note, though: even though you are generally allowed to use "I" (or "we") in papers written largely in the active voice, you must beware of overuse. Note how, thanks to the active verbs, we can readily picture the described phenomena even without the figures being supplied. This writer understood well how to marshal active verbs to explain phenomena. The inside boundary rotates opposite in direction, and thus the change in relative velocity with distance across the boundary produces drag.Ĭlearly, this is a paragraph that the writer toiled over, yet, thanks to the clear transitions and sensible use of the active voice, it is highly readable and efficient. As the smoke ring continues to move (Figure 5), the outside boundary of the ring rotates toward the same direction as the relative motion of the surrounding air. The trail of smoke behind the moving smoke ring indicates that the same viscous stress that caused the smoke ring to form also causes its eventual destruction. As the picture shows, the smoke ring moves away from its source and trails smoke from its center. Note the consistent use of simple exact subjects followed by active descriptive verbs.įigure 4 depicts a smoke ring in which the layers of a toroidal vortex ring are visible. This paragraph is especially impressive in that it explains the complex concept of vorticity through an analysis of the seemingly ordinary phenomenon of smoke rings. The following excerpt from a meteorology paper demonstrates how admirable and efficient the active voice can be. ![]()
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