Upon reading "Teaching Writing to Undergrads," I was a bit dismayed by John T. Ikeda Franklin's statement on use of the passive versus active voice when writing science reports (C&EN, Oct. 30, 2006, ...

"We applied an external magnetic field of 4 T while increasing the pressure to 300 kPa." or "An external magnetic field of 4 T was applied as the pressure was increased to 300 kPa." Which is the ...

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 ...

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 ...

The passive voice is an important grammatical structure that appears in every form of written and spoken English. Knowledge of this construction is vital for reading and writing English in everyday ...

The active and passive voice are different ways of structuring the same information in a sentence. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence comes first and performs the action (the verb). The ...