Remember: "passive voice" does not mean "any instance where you let someone off the hook." 7. The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq .

Guided Practice Below is a brief exercise in identifying passive voice constructions. Read each sentence below. If you think that it contains a passive voice construction, click YES; if you think that ...

The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing, ...

In passive voice, helping verbs are necessary to indicate the passive construction. These are forms of the verb "to be" (is, are, was, were, being, been).

Passive Voice. 1. I wrote the essay. (active voice) 2. The essay was written by me. (Passive voice) 3. The essay will be written. (Passive voice) Although the verb is in the active or passive voice, ...

Now she is teaching me a lesson: that the passive can be vivid – to the boundary of yuck, as in “peeled” and “sawed off.” That’s when it hit me like a pool cue to the solar plexus.

Passive voice is often awkward and hard to understand. Now let’s look at a quick example of both: Humans are destroying the rain forest. The rain forest is being destroyed by humans.

In the active voice, the doer is the subject: Squirrels ate my birdseed. In the passive, the done-to is the subject— My birdseed was eaten —and the doer is an oblique object (… by s quirrels ...

The passive, Pinker emphasizes, is a voice and not a tense: “It’s the difference between ‘the man bit the dog’ and ‘the dog was bitten by the man,'” he explains. (The latter example is ...