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What do you want to emphasize? If it's the person doing the action, by all means use active voice. "Heinrich Schliemann ate a sandwich" emphasizes Schliemann, while "the sandwich was eaten by Hei...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T00:49:29Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/555 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
David Thornley
·
2019-12-08T00:49:29Z (almost 5 years ago)
What do you want to emphasize? If it's the person doing the action, by all means use active voice. "Heinrich Schliemann ate a sandwich" emphasizes Schliemann, while "the sandwich was eaten by Heinrich Schliemann" emphasizes the sandwich. Contrast this with "Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy", which seems more at home in a biography of Herr Schliemann, versus "Troy was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann". Usually, the person and the action are the more interesting parts of the sentence, and people identify more with the person than the object. This typically means that active voice is more interesting and easier to read. (This holds even when the object is the more important part, which is one reason scientific papers are often unpleasant to read: "The correlation was found to be significant at p \< 0.01" is dryer than "We found the correlation to be significant a p \< 0.01", even though the important part is the correlation and not the investigators.) "Troy", on the other hand, grabs much harder than "Hermann Schliemann".
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2010-11-27T15:29:55Z (almost 14 years ago)
Original score: 6