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The use of active or passive voice is dictated by where your focus is: on the subject or object of the actiin. Who is your sentence/paragraph/chapter about? John or Bob? If it is about John and w...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17882 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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# The use of active or passive voice is dictated by where your _focus_ is: on the subject or object of the actiin. Who is your sentence/paragraph/chapter about? John or Bob? If it is about John and what he does, use the active voice: > John killed Bob. If it is about Bob and what he experiences, use the passive voice: > Bob had been killed by John. * * * Should you build a car without a reverse gear just because driving backwards from New York to Baltimore would get you arrested or killed? The abuse of passive voice by mediocre writers does not make it useless.