More of your verbs should be active than passive. The common wisdom from English teachers is that active verbs are stronger and clearer than passive ones, and this time, I’m on the side of the common wisdom. In the sentence The ball was caught by the catcher, the ball isn’t doing the catching – the catcher is – but the ball is still the subject of the sentence. By contrast, the subject of a sentence in passive voice is being acted upon. For example, in the sentence The pitcher threw the baseball, the pitcher, the subject of the sentence, is the one doing the throwing to the baseball, the object of the sentence. If the subject of the sentence is the actor, we say that the verb is in active voice. In case you need a refresher, verb voice describes the relationship between the subject of a sentence and the action of the sentence. Yes, you guessed it, we are rushing headlong into active versus passive voice, and why (and how) in your writing, you should use active voice most of the time.

“ Because the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx is brought up before the dream sequence starts, the tragic love story genre is established.” “Mistakes were made.” “ In ‘The Peasant’s Fart,’* bad smells are utilized to symbolize sinful and unclean living.” “ The imagery in the three poems was analyzed so that patterns across images could be detected.”

I spent what felt like entire semesters trying to get the engineers to stop writing things like: Every time I thought I had stamped it out, it would re-surface, like Jason from Crystal Lake, in someone’s essay, so deeply was this habit ingrained in their scientific psyches. Yet the engineers (and the pre-med students and all the other STEM students) brought an annoying bad writing habit with them. I loved teaching the engineers: they were funny, geeky, and had a different, more concrete way of looking at literature than humanities-focused students did. Back when I taught at Fancy Pants University, my writing courses were very popular (for reasons I have never completely figured out) with engineering students.

Active voice in writing