A MEMBER of Jose Carrillo’s Forum who goes by the user name Baklis asked me this tough question recently: “How does the perfect tense in the passive voice differ from the perfect tense in the active ...

Whether you write on a part- or full-time basis, you can benefit from becoming more familiar with an often-overlooked aspect of writing that is treated in today’s column: active and passive voice ...

Writing in the active voice makes the meaning clear while keeping sentences from becoming complicated and wordy. Sentences using passive voice are not necessarily wrong, just less effective than ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Laura Brown writes about business communication. If you’ve ever had any writing training, either at school or on the job, you’ve ...

What is the difference between the active and passive voice? We usually try to write in the active voice because it’s easier to understand. In the active voice the subject ‘does’ the action: Notice ...

For many writers, feedback that your copy is "too passive" can be frustrating. The passive voice is, after all, grammatically correct. But there's a reason that public relations and communications ...

When you can’t properly situate or correlate different actions or events as they happen in time, it’s symptomatic of an inadequate grasp of the perfect tenses in the passive voice. This was evidently ...

Regarding the April 27 Bilingual page article, "Stop worrying and embrace the passive tense": Sorry to nitpick, but I think someone writing a column on language is obliged to be careful about ...

perfect j’ai été, tu as été, il a été, nous avons été, vous avez été, ils ont été imperfect j’étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions, vous étiez, ils étaient near future je vais être, tu vas être, ...

This handout is also available for download in PDF format. We refer to a sentence as being in the "active voice" when the subject is performing the action of the sentence (the verb). A sentence is in ...