Passive Voice: When to Avoid It and When to Use It

Grammarly

The passive voice is often maligned by teachers and professors as a bad writing habit. Or, to put that in the active voice: Teachers and professors across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit.

What is the passive voice?

In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active. The subject is something, or it does the action of the verb in the sentence. With the passive voice , the subject is acted upon by some other performer of the verb. (In case you weren’t paying attention, the previous two sentences use the type of voice they describe.)

But the passive voice is not incorrect. In fact, there are times when it can come in handy. Read on to learn how to form the active and passive voices , when using the passive voice is a good idea, and how to avoid confusing it with similar forms.

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The difference between active and passive voice

While tense is all about time references, voice describes whether the grammatical subject of a clause performs or receives the action of the verb .

Here’s the formula for the active voice:

[subject]+[verb (performed by the subject)]+[optional object]

Chester kicked the ball.

In a passive voice construction, the grammatical subject of the clause receives the action of the verb. So the ball from the above sentence, which is receiving the action, becomes the subject. The formula:

[subject]+[some form of the verb to be ]+[past participle of a transitive verb]+[optional prepositional phrase]

The ball was kicked by Chester.

That last little bit—“by Chester”—is a prepositional phrase that tells you who the performer of the action is. But even though Chester is the one doing the kicking, he’s no longer the grammatical subject. A passive voice construction can even drop him from the sentence entirely:

The ball was kicked.

How’s that for anticlimactic?

When (and when not) to use the passive voice

If you’re writing anything with a definitive subject that is performing an action, you’ll be better off using the active voice. And if you search your document for occurrences of was , is , or were and your page lights up with instances of passive voice, it may be a good idea to switch to active voice.

That said, there are times when the passive voice does a better job of presenting an idea, especially when the performer of the action of a sentence’s verb is very general or diffuse, is unknown, or should get less emphasis than the recipient of that action, including in certain formal, professional, and legal contexts. Here are five common uses of the passive voice:

1 In broad statements about widely held opinions or social norms

Tipping less than 20 percent is now considered rude.

The writer of this sentence is communicating that they believe enough people share the opinion that tipping less than 20 percent is rude to qualify as a consensus. In other words, the performer of the action—the people doing the considering—is so general that it can be left out of the sentence entirely.

2 In reports of crimes with unknown perpetrators or other actions with unknown doers

My car was stolen yesterday.

If you knew who stole the car, you might be closer to getting it back. The passive voice here emphasizes the stolen item and the action of theft.

The grass was cut yesterday.

The emphasis here is on the grass, which presumably is observably shorter. Someone must have cut it, but whoever it was is not the concern of this sentence.

3 In scientific contexts

The rat was placed in a T-shaped maze.

Who placed the rat in the maze? Scientists, duh. But that’s less important than the experiment they’re conducting. Therefore , passive voice.

4 When the writer or speaker wants to avoid blame

Sometimes, someone wants to acknowledge that something unpleasant happened without making it crystal -clear who’s at fault. The classic example:

“ Mistakes were made .”

Who made them? Is anyone taking responsibility? What’s the solution here? One political scientist dubbed this kind of construction the “past exonerative” because it’s meant to exonerate the speaker/writer from whatever foul may have been committed. In other words, drop the subject, get off the hook.

5 In any other situation where you want to keep the focus on an action and/or the recipient of the action

The president was sworn in on a cold January morning.

How many people can remember off the top of their heads who swears in presidents? Clearly, the occasion of swearing in the commander in chief is the thing to emphasize here.

Cleo was transformed by the experience of traveling alone in Latin America.

In this case, we know what brought about the action: It was the experience of traveling alone in South America. But the thing the sentence most urgently wants us to know is that a person, Cleo, had an important thing happen to them. So making the recipient of the action ( Cleo ) the subject of the sentence, using the passive voice, and tucking the performer of the action ( the experience ) after the action as the object of the preposition by makes sense.

In each of the above contexts, the action itself—or the person or thing receiving the action—is the part that matters. That means the performer of the action can be absent from the sentence altogether or appear in a prepositional phrase with by . Although some of these examples are formal, others show that the passive voice is often useful and necessary in daily life. In each of the sentences below, the passive voice is natural and clear for one of the reasons in the list above. Rewriting these sentences in the active voice renders them sterile, awkward, or syntactically contorted.

Passive: Bob Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident.

Active: A motorcycle accident injured Bob Dylan.

Passive: Elvis is rumored to be alive .

Active: People rumor Elvis to be alive.

Passive: Don’t be fooled!

Active: Don’t allow anything to fool you!

Creative ways to use the passive voice in writing

The above examples show some common uses of the passive voice, but some writers and speakers take advantage of the shift in emphasis it provides for other reasons. Here are some uses for the passive voice as a stylistic decision that suits the author’s writing goals.

Beating around the bush

Jane Austen is a master of poking fun at her characters so euphemistically that it seems almost polite, and the passive voice is one of her favorite methods for doing that.

“He . . . pressed them so cordially to dine at Barton Park every day till they were better settled at home that, though his entreaties were carried to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they could not give offense.” — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Austen could have rephrased this sentence like so:

Though Mr. Middleton carried his entreaties to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they could not give offense.

Though maybe she means something closer to:

Mr. Middleton repeated his invitations beyond the point of politeness and into pushiness, but he meant well and they didn’t feel they could say “no.”

In cases like this, the passive voice allows for more polite phrasing, even if it’s also a little less clear. In this specific case, Austen’s use of the passive also abets her gentle humor and vivid characterization.

Directing the reader’s attention

This is like the grass getting cut or the president being sworn in: The recipient of the action of the verb is more important than the performer of the action.

“ That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floating sideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.” — Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Here, you could invert the sentence to say “Historians evoked that treasure” and so on. But that would take the focus away from that oh-so-intriguing treasure and corpse. And since the historians are less important here, the author makes the choice to stress the key idea of the sentence through the passive voice.

Here’s another famous example that puts the emphasis on what happens to the recipient instead of on what the performer is doing:

“ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — The Declaration of Independence

“All men” (these days, we take this to mean all people) gets boosted to the front of the phrase because the people and their equality and rights are the focus. It makes sense that a statement declaring independence would focus on the citizens who get that independence, after all.

Passive voice misuse

Sometimes what looks like passive voice isn’t passive voice at all. Even the most careful eye can mistake the following sentences for being in passive voice.

Chester’s favorite activity is kicking.

The bank robbery took place just before closing time.

There is nothing we can do about it.

There were a great number of dead leaves covering the ground.

Despite what any well-meaning English teachers may have told you, none of the sentences above are written in the passive voice. The sentence about the leaves, in fact, was (wrongly) presented as an example of the passive voice by none other than Strunk and White in The Elements of Style .

Using the verb to be doesn’t automatically put a verb phrase into the passive voice. You also need a past participle. That’s how to keep passive voice masqueraders from fooling you.

Passive voice summed up

  • The passive voice isn’t a grammatical error; it’s a matter of style.
  • Use the active voice if it makes your sentence sound clearer and more natural.
  • Forming passive voice requires the verb to be and a past participle .
  • The passive voice is your friend when the thing receiving an action or the action itself is the important part of the sentence—especially in scientific and legal contexts, times when the performer of an action is unknown, or cases where the subject is distracting or irrelevant.
  • When it comes to good writing, don’t be passive—even if your sentences sometimes need to be.

i am writing an essay change the voice

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Active Voice vs Passive Voice in Essay Writing: What's the Difference?

Adela B.

Table of contents

Every type of writing spanning academic assignments, research proposals, movie or book reviews , newspaper articles, technical or scientific writing, and more, requires a verb in the sentence to express an action being taken.

Essentially, we know that there are two types of voices in writing – active voice vs. passive voice. Both voices have a different sentence structure, length, purpose, and tone of writing.

Now when you analyze your writing, you would be able to find specific sentences that pop out and leave a mark on the reader while some sentences remain bland and unengaging.

This will determine your active voice sentences and your passive voice sentences.

You think to yourself, “how do I choose the right voice for my writing?”

What is Active Voice in Essay Writing

In a sentence, the active voice is used when the subject or person in this specific sentence is the one who is carrying out an action that was represented by the verb. The subject is always a noun or a pronoun and this voice is used to express information in a stronger, more direct, clear, and easier-to-read way than passive voice sentences.

Active voice highlights a logical flow to your sentences and makes your writing feel alive and current – which is pivotal to use in your formal academic writing assignments to get top-scoring grades.

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What is passive voice in essay writing.

The passive voice, in a sentence, is used to emphasize the action taken place by the subject according to the verb. In this, the passive phrase always contains a conjugated form of ‘to be’ and the past participle of the main verb.

Due to this, passive sentences also include prepositions, which makes them longer and wordier than active voice sentences.

Active Voice vs. Passive Voice

Now, let us understand the difference between active voice vs. passive voice in writing.

The choice between using active voice vs. passive voice in writing always comes down to the requirements that are suitable for the type of sentences you choose to write.

For most of the writing that you do, be it blogs, emails, different types of academic essays, and more, an active voice is ideal to use for communicating and expressing your thoughts, facts, and ideas more clearly and efficiently. This way, your essay papers or other academic assessments stand out amongst the rest.

Use your judgment to write in an active voice if accuracy is not an important aspect, and always keep your readers in mind. In this case, academic writing teachers - ranging from middle school to college/universities, prefer reading your assignments in an active voice as it makes your arguments, thoughts, and sentence structures confident, brief, and compelling.

However, there are a few exceptions to using passive voice

  • If the reader is aware of the subject;
  • In expository writing (where the primary goal is to provide an explanation or a context);
  • Crime reports, data analysis;
  • Scientific and technical writing.

Passive voice is majorly used while writing assignments that direct the reader's focus onto the specific action taking place rather than the subject. It is also used when you need an authoritative tone, like on a banner or a sign on a bulletin board.

Passive voice is ideally used when the person involved in the action is not known and/or is insignificant. Similarly, if you are writing something that requires you to be objective with its solution and analysis – like a research paper, lab report , or newspaper article – using passive voice should be your go-to choice. This allows you to avoid personal pronouns, which in turn, helps you present your analysis or information in an unbiased and coherent way.

However, if your writing is meant to engage your target audience, such as a novel, then writing your sentences with a passive voice will not only flatten your content and make your writing clumsy to read, but your paper would also inherit all the extra words that would make your write-ups vague and too wordy.

2. Examples of active and passive voice

Every active voice sentence contains a form of action that is taking place by the subject. An interesting fact is that they can be written in any tense – past tense, present tense, past perfect tense, future tense, and more.

An active voice always emits a sense of agency and strength in your writing.

Here are some examples of active voice sentence structuring

  • Kaitlyn worked on her upcoming novel all day long.
  • Our professor will reveal this week’s surprise assignment.
  • The police know that the accused is a flight risk.
  • A baby monkey bit Sasha on her leg.
  • I presented my research thesis to the class.
  • Malek proposed the methods & principles by which each product could be analyzed.
  • We will ride a train to go to Switzerland.
  • I conducted a study of criminal psychology.
  • The gardener was planting the Hydrangeas.

Whereas passive voice sentence structures are lengthier in words and are used when the subject or person is the recipient of an action. Passive voice in writing often conveys subtlety, submissiveness, and lack of engagement.

Moreover, just like active sentences, passive sentence structures do not need to be dependent on the verb, as they can occur in the past tense, the future tense, the subjunctive, etc.

Here are some examples of passive-voice sentences

  • We were driven to Universal Studios by our professor.
  • Clara was persuaded to move to Toronto.
  • Jack was given two choices for the presentation topic.
  • The jobs were given to two people who had no experience in writing.
  • An old bike and a gun were found in the toolshed.
  • The moon was walked by Neil Armstrong.
  • The candy was eaten by the lady in yellow.
  • Ballet dancing is a beloved activity in our class.
  • The concert will be enjoyed by us tomorrow.
  • Some new books were bought by me.

3. Changing passive voice to active voice

Unless you’re required to use passive voice, it is always beneficial to use active voice in your writing. That’s why overusing and misusing passive sentences can make your writing look sloppy, wordy and non-informative and you may even end up with more grammatical errors.

Here are a few ways to change your passive sentence into an active sentence

a. Identify the passive voice

In writing, the writer should choose their verb tenses, word choice, and tonality of the content very carefully.

As you finish your draft, re-read it to identify sentences that could have been more concise, or framed in a better way to improve its readability. Ask yourself what the action of the specific sentence, who is perpetrating this action is.

That is your passive voice.

Passive voice or tone consists of a past, past participle or future tense and generally the auxiliary word ‘to be’ is an indication of a passive sentence. It always refers to action not being addressed directly.

b. Remove the auxiliary verb

It's best to remove the auxiliary verb from your sentences to change it into active voice sentences by adjusting the tense of the main verb. Generally, the tense of the main verb is in the past tense.

So, determine the correct tense and use it in your verb to create an active sentence. This in turn delivers your writing in a more clear, strong, concise and urgent way.

Here’s an interesting video by mmmEnglish that explains what auxiliary verbs are.

c. Change the subject of the sentence

The main difference between active voice and passive voice is that one performs a verb and the other is a recipient of an action.

For example, in a passive sentence, “The novel was drafted by the writer”, the ‘novel’ is the subject which had been actioned by the writer.

To change it into an active voice, restructure the verb that is taking place (drafted by the writer) with the subject (novel), thus structuring “The writer drafted the novel”.

Once you have mastered the technique of identifying the voice and tonality, you will discover the ease with which your communication takes on different textures, depending upon the context at hand. While the active voice remains the direct form of communication and has more mass appeal, it is the passive voice that assumes a less biased and more objective tone.

Make sure to embellish your written expression with the right voice and give it the power and authority it deserves. We hope the tips and suggestions given above will go a long way in giving weightage to every sentence that you write and strike the right chord with readers.

When you work with Writers Per Hour, you’ll be happy to know that our professional team of writers knows when to use active and passive voice correctly, which works best for the type of paper.

If you’re running short of time or are not confident about your English writing skills, reach out to us, and we’ll ensure you receive nothing short of professionally written, high-quality papers.

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Passive Voice: When to Use It and When to Avoid It

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What is passive voice?

In English, all sentences are in either “active” or “passive” voice:

active: Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle in 1927. passive: The uncertainty principle was formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

In an active sentence, the person or thing responsible for the action in the sentence comes first. In a passive sentence, the person or thing acted on comes first, and the actor is added at the end, introduced with the preposition “by.” The passive form of the verb is signaled by a form of “to be”: in the sentence above, “was formulated” is in passive voice while “formulated” is in active.

In a passive sentence, we often omit the actor completely:

The uncertainty principle was formulated in 1927.

When do I use passive voice?

In some sentences, passive voice can be perfectly acceptable. You might use it in the following cases:

The cave paintings of Lascaux were made in the Upper Old Stone Age. [We don’t know who made them.]
An experimental solar power plant will be built in the Australian desert. [We are not interested in who is building it.]
Mistakes were made. [Common in bureaucratic writing!]
Rules are made to be broken. [By whomever, whenever.]
Insulin was first discovered in 1921 by researchers at the University of Toronto. It is still the only treatment available for diabetes.
The sodium hydroxide was dissolved in water. This solution was then titrated with hydrochloric acid.

In these sentences you can count on your reader to know that you are the one who did the dissolving and the titrating. The passive voice places the emphasis on your experiment rather than on you.

Note: Over the past several years, there has been a movement within many science disciplines away from passive voice. Scientists often now prefer active voice in most parts of their published reports, even occasionally using the subject “we” in the Materials and Methods section. Check with your instructor or TA whether you can use the first person “I” or “we” in your lab reports to help avoid the passive.

When should I avoid passive voice?

Passive sentences can get you into trouble in academic writing because they can be vague about who is responsible for the action:

Both Othello and Iago desire Desdemona. She is courted. [Who courts Desdemona? Othello? Iago? Both of them?]

Academic writing often focuses on differences between the ideas of different researchers, or between your own ideas and those of the researchers you are discussing. Too many passive sentences can create confusion:

Research has been done to discredit this theory. [Who did the research? You? Your professor? Another author?]

Some students use passive sentences to hide holes in their research:

The telephone was invented in the nineteenth century. [I couldn’t find out who invented the telephone!]

Finally, passive sentences often sound wordy and indirect. They can make the reader work unnecessarily hard. And since they are usually longer than active sentences, passive sentences take up precious room in your paper:

Since the car was being driven by Michael at the time of the accident, the damages should be paid for by him.

Weeding out passive sentences

If you now use a lot of passive sentences, you may not be able to catch all of the problematic cases in your first draft. But you can still go back through your essay hunting specifically for passive sentences. At first, you may want to ask for help from a writing instructor. The grammar checker in your word processor can help spot passive sentences, though grammar checkers should always be used with extreme caution since they can easily mislead you. To spot passive sentences, look for a form of the verb to be in your sentence, with the actor either missing or introduced after the verb using the word “by”:

Poland was invaded in 1939, thus initiating the Second World War. Genetic information is encoded by DNA. The possibility of cold fusion has been examined for many years.

Try turning each passive sentence you find into an active one. Start your new sentence with the actor. Sometimes you may find that need to do some extra research or thinking to figure out who the actor should be! You will likely find that your new sentence is stronger, shorter, and more precise:

Germany invaded Poland in 1939, thus initiating the Second World War. DNA encodes genetic information. Physicists have examined the possibility of cold fusion for many years.

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Passive Voice

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you understand what the passive voice is, why many professors and writing instructors frown upon it, and how you can revise your paper to achieve greater clarity. Some things here may surprise you. We hope this handout will help you to understand the passive voice and allow you to make more informed choices as you write.

So what is the passive voice? First, let’s be clear on what the passive voice isn’t. Below, we’ll list some common myths about the passive voice:

1. Myth: Use of the passive voice constitutes a grammatical error.

Use of the passive voice is not a grammatical error. It’s a stylistic issue that pertains to clarity—that is, there are times when using the passive voice can prevent a reader from understanding what you mean.

2. Myth: Any use of “to be” (in any form) constitutes the passive voice.

The passive voice entails more than just using a being verb. Using “to be” can weaken the impact of your writing, but it is occasionally necessary and does not by itself constitute the passive voice.

3. Myth: The passive voice always avoids the first person; if something is in first person (“I” or “we”) it’s also in the active voice.

On the contrary, you can very easily use the passive voice in the first person. Here’s an example: “I was hit by the dodgeball.”

4. Myth: You should never use the passive voice.

While the passive voice can weaken the clarity of your writing, there are times when the passive voice is OK and even preferable.

5. Myth: I can rely on my grammar checker to catch the passive voice.

See Myth #1. Since the passive voice isn’t a grammar error, it’s not always caught. Typically, grammar checkers catch only a fraction of passive voice usage.

Do any of these misunderstandings sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. That’s why we wrote this handout. It discusses how to recognize the passive voice, when you should avoid it, and when it’s OK.

Defining the passive voice

A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Take a look at this passive rephrasing of a familiar joke:

Why was the road crossed by the chicken?

Who is doing the action in this sentence? The chicken is the one doing the action in this sentence, but the chicken is not in the spot where you would expect the grammatical subject to be. Instead, the road is the grammatical subject. The more familiar phrasing (why did the chicken cross the road?) puts the actor in the subject position, the position of doing something—the chicken (the actor/doer) crosses the road (the object). We use active verbs to represent that “doing,” whether it be crossing roads, proposing ideas, making arguments, or invading houses (more on that shortly).

Once you know what to look for, passive constructions are easy to spot. Look for a form of “to be” (is, are, am, was, were, has been, have been, had been, will be, will have been, being) followed by a past participle. (The past participle is a form of the verb that typically, but not always, ends in “-ed.” Some exceptions to the “-ed” rule are words like “paid” (not “payed”) and “driven.” (not “drived”).

Here’s a sure-fire formula for identifying the passive voice:

form of “to be” + past participle = passive voice

For example:

The metropolis has been scorched by the dragon’s fiery breath.

When her house was invaded, Penelope had to think of ways to delay her remarriage.

Not every sentence that contains a form of “have” or “be” is passive! Forms of the word “have” can do several different things in English. For example, in the sentence “John has to study all afternoon,” “has” is not part of a past-tense verb. It’s a modal verb, like “must,” “can,” or “may”—these verbs tell how necessary it is to do something (compare “I have to study” versus “I may study”). And forms of “be” are not always passive, either—”be” can be the main verb of a sentence that describes a state of being, rather than an action. For example, the sentence “John is a good student” is not passive; “is” is simply describing John’s state of being. The moral of the story: don’t assume that any time you see a form of “have” and a form of “to be” together, you are looking at a passive sentence.

Need more help deciding whether a sentence is passive? Ask yourself whether there is an action going on in the sentence. If so, what is at the front of the sentence? Is it the person or thing that does the action? Or is it the person or thing that has the action done to it? In a passive sentence, the object of the action will be in the subject position at the front of the sentence. As discussed above, the sentence will also contain a form of be and a past participle. If the subject appears at all, it will usually be at the end of the sentence, often in a phrase that starts with “by.” Take a look at this example:

The fish was caught by the seagull.

If we ask ourselves whether there’s an action, the answer is yes: a fish is being caught. If we ask what’s at the front of the sentence, the actor or the object of the action, it’s the object: the fish, unfortunately for it, got caught, and there it is at the front of the sentence. The thing that did the catching—the seagull—is at the end, after “by.” There’s a form of be (was) and a past participle (caught). This sentence is passive.

Let’s briefly look at how to change passive constructions into active ones. You can usually just switch the word order, making the actor and subject one by putting the actor up front:

The dragon has scorched the metropolis with his fiery breath.

After suitors invaded her house, Penelope had to think of ways to delay her remarriage.

To repeat, the key to identifying the passive voice is to look for both a form of “to be” and a past participle, which usually, but not always, ends in “-ed.”

Clarity and meaning

The primary reason why your instructors frown on the passive voice is that they often have to guess what you mean. Sometimes, the confusion is minor. Let’s look again at that sentence from a student’s paper on Homer’s The Odyssey:

Like many passive constructions, this sentence lacks explicit reference to the actor—it doesn’t tell the reader who or what invaded Penelope’s house. The active voice clarifies things:

After suitors invaded Penelope’s house, she had to think of ways to fend them off.

Thus many instructors—the readers making sense of your writing—prefer that you use the active voice. They want you to specify who or what is doing the action. Compare the following two examples from an anthropology paper on a Laotian village to see if you agree.

(passive)  A new system of drug control laws was set up. (By whom?)

(active)  The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party set up a new system of drug control laws.

Here’s another example, from the same paper, that illustrates the lack of precision that can accompany the passive voice:

Gender training was conducted in six villages, thus affecting social relationships.

And a few pages later:

Plus, marketing links were being established.

In both paragraphs, the writer never specifies the actors for those two actions (Who did the gender training? Who established marketing links?). Thus the reader has trouble appreciating the dynamics of these social interactions, which depend upon the actors conducting and establishing these things.

The following example, once again from that paper on The Odyssey, typifies another instance where an instructor might desire more precision and clarity:

Although Penelope shares heroic characteristics with her husband, Odysseus, she is not considered a hero.

Who does not consider Penelope a hero? It’s difficult to tell, but the rest of that paragraph suggests that the student does not consider Penelope a hero (the topic of the paper). The reader might also conceivably think that the student is referring to critics, scholars, or modern readers of The Odyssey. One might argue that the meaning comes through here—the problem is merely stylistic. Yet style affects how your reader understands your argument and content. Awkward or unclear style prevents your reader from appreciating the ideas that are so clear to you when you write. Thus knowing how your reader might react enables you to make more effective choices when you revise. So after you identify instances of the passive, you should consider whether your use of the passive inhibits clear understanding of what you mean.

Summarizing history or literary plots with the passive voice: don’t be a lazy thinker or writer!

With the previous section in mind, you should also know that some instructors proclaim that the passive voice signals sloppy, lazy thinking. These instructors argue that writers who overuse the passive voice have not fully thought through what they are discussing and that this makes for imprecise arguments. Consider these sentences from papers on American history:

The working class was marginalized. African Americans were discriminated against. Women were not treated as equals.

Such sentences lack the precision and connection to context and causes that mark rigorous thinking. The reader learns little about the systems, conditions, human decisions, and contradictions that produced these groups’ experiences of oppression. And so the reader—the instructor—questions the writer’s understanding of these things.

It is especially important to be sure that your thesis statement is clear and precise, so think twice before using the passive voice in your thesis.

In papers where you discuss the work of an author—e.g., a historian or writer of literature—you can also strengthen your writing by not relying on the passive as a crutch when summarizing plots or arguments. Instead of writing:

It is argued that… or  Tom and Huck are portrayed as… or  And then the link between X and Y is made, showing that…

you can heighten the level of your analysis by explicitly connecting an author with these statements:

Anderson argues that… Twain portrays Tom and Huck as… Ishiguro draws a link between X and Y to show that…

By avoiding passive constructions in these situations, you can demonstrate a more thorough understanding of the material you discuss.

Scientific writing

All this advice works for papers in the humanities, you might note—but what about technical or scientific papers, including lab reports? Many instructors recommend or even require the passive voice in such writing. The rationale for using the passive voice in scientific writing is that it achieves “an objective tone”—for example, by avoiding the first person. To consider scientific writing, let’s break it up into two main types: lab reports and writing about a scientific topic or literature.

Lab reports

Although more and more scientific journals accept or even prefer first-person active voice (e.g., “then we sequenced the human genome”), some of your instructors may want you to remove yourself from your lab report by using the passive voice (e.g., “then the human genome was sequenced” rather than “then we sequenced the human genome”). Such advice particularly applies to the section on Materials and Methods, where a procedure “is followed.” (For a fuller discussion on writing lab reports, see our handout on writing lab reports .)

While you might employ the passive voice to retain objectivity, you can still use active constructions in some instances and retain your objective stance. Thus it’s useful to keep in mind the sort of active verbs you might use in lab reports. Examples include: support, indicate, suggest, correspond, challenge, yield, show.

Thus instead of writing:

A number of things are indicated by these results.

you could write:

These results indicate a number of things . or Further analysis showed/suggested/yielded…

Ultimately, you should find out your instructor’s preference regarding your use of the passive in lab reports.

Writing about scientific topics

In some assignments, rather than reporting the results of your own scientific work, you will be writing about the work of other scientists. Such assignments might include literature reviews and research reports on scientific topics. You have two main possible tasks in these assignments: reporting what other people have done (their research or experiments) or indicating general scientific knowledge (the body of knowledge coming out of others’ research). Often the two go together. In both instances, you can easily use active constructions even though you might be tempted by the passive—especially if you’re used to writing your own lab reports in the passive.

You decide: Which of these two examples is clearer?

(passive) Heart disease is considered the leading cause of death in the United States.

or (active)  Research points to heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States.

Alternatively, you could write this sentence with human actors:

Researchers have concluded that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.

The last two sentences illustrate a relationship that the first one lacks. The first example does not tell who or what leads us to accept this conclusion about heart disease.

Here’s one last example from a report that describes angioplasty. Which sounds better to you?

The balloon is positioned in an area of blockage and is inflated. or The surgeon positions the balloon in an area of blockage and inflates it.

You can improve your scientific writing by relying less on the passive. The advice we’ve given for papers on history or literature equally applies to papers in more “scientific” courses. No matter what field you’re writing in, when you use the passive voice, you risk conveying to your reader a sense of uncertainty and imprecision regarding your writing and thinking. The key is to know when your instructor wants you to use the passive voice. For a more general discussion of writing in the sciences , see our handout.

“Swindles and perversions”

Before we discuss a few instances when the passive might be preferable, we should mention one of the more political uses of the passive: to hide blame or obscure responsibility. You wouldn’t do this, but you can learn how to become a critic of those who exhibit what George Orwell included among the “swindles and perversions” of writing. For example:

Mistakes were made.

The Exxon Company accepts that a few gallons might have been spilled.

By becoming critically aware of how others use language to shape clarity and meaning, you can learn how better to revise your own work. Keep Orwell’s swindles and perversions in mind as you read other writers. Because it’s easy to leave the actor out of passive sentences, some people use the passive voice to avoid mentioning who is responsible for certain actions.

So when is it OK to use the passive?

Sometimes the passive voice is the best choice. Here are a few instances when the passive voice is quite useful:

1. To emphasize an object. Take a look at this example:

One hundred votes are required to pass the bill.

This passive sentence emphasizes the number of votes required. An active version of the sentence (“The bill requires 100 votes to pass”) would put the emphasis on the bill, which may be less dramatic.

2. To de-emphasize an unknown subject/actor. Consider this example:

Over 120 different contaminants have been dumped into the river.

If you don’t know who the actor is—in this case, if you don’t actually know who dumped all of those contaminants in the river—then you may need to write in the passive. But remember, if you do know the actor, and if the clarity and meaning of your writing would benefit from indicating him/her/it/them, then use an active construction. Yet consider the third case.

3. If your readers don’t need to know who’s responsible for the action.

Here’s where your choice can be difficult; some instances are less clear than others. Try to put yourself in your reader’s position to anticipate how he/she will react to the way you have phrased your thoughts. Here are two examples:

(passive)  Baby Sophia was delivered at 3:30 a.m. yesterday.

and (active)  Dr. Susan Jones delivered baby Sophia at 3:30 a.m. yesterday.

The first sentence might be more appropriate in a birth announcement sent to family and friends—they are not likely to know Dr. Jones and are much more interested in the “object”(the baby) than in the actor (the doctor). A hospital report of yesterday’s events might be more likely to focus on Dr. Jones’ role.

Summary of strategies

  • Look for the passive voice: “to be” + a past participle (usually, but not always, ending in “-ed”)
  • If you don’t see both components, move on.
  • Does the sentence describe an action? If so, where is the actor? Is he/she/it in the grammatical subject position (at the front of the sentence) or in the object position (at the end of the sentence, or missing entirely)?
  • Does the sentence end with “by…”? Many passive sentences include the actor at the end of the sentence in a “by” phrase, like “The ball was hit by the player ” or “The shoe was chewed up by the dog .” “By” by itself isn’t a conclusive sign of the passive voice, but it can prompt you to take a closer look.
  • Is the doer/actor indicated? Should you indicate him/her/it?
  • Does it really matter who’s responsible for the action?
  • Would your reader ask you to clarify a sentence because of an issue related to your use of the passive?
  • Do you use a passive construction in your thesis statement?
  • Do you use the passive as a crutch in summarizing a plot or history, or in describing something?
  • Do you want to emphasize the object?
  • If you decide that your sentence would be clearer in the active voice, switch the sentence around to make the subject and actor one. Put the actor (the one doing the action of the sentence) in front of the verb.

Towards active thinking and writing

We encourage you to keep these tips in mind as you revise. While you may be able to employ this advice as you write your first draft, that’s not necessarily always possible. In writing, clarity often comes when you revise, not on your first try. Don’t worry about the passive if that stress inhibits you in getting your ideas down on paper. But do look for it when you revise. Actively make choices about its proper place in your writing. There is nothing grammatically or otherwise “wrong” about using the passive voice. The key is to recognize when you should, when you shouldn’t, and when your instructor just doesn’t want you to. These choices are yours. We hope this handout helps you to make them.

Works consulted and suggested reading

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Baron, Dennis E. 1989. “The Passive Voice Can Be Your Friend.” In Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary , 17-22. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers.

Hjortshoj, Keith. 2001. The Transition to College Writing . New York: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Lanham, Richard A. 2006. Revising Prose , 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman.

Orwell, George. 1968. “Politics and the English Language.” In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, 4: 127-140. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens. 2000. The Allyn and Bacon Handbook , 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Strunk, William, and E.B. White. 2000. The Elements of Style , 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Trimble, John R. 2000. Writing With Style , 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Williams, Joseph, and Joseph Bizup. 2017. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace , 12th ed. Boston: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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This handout will explain the difference between active and passive voice in writing. It gives examples of both, and shows how to turn a passive sentence into an active one. Also, it explains how to decide when to choose passive voice instead of active.

In a sentence using passive voice , the subject is acted upon; he or she receives the action expressed by the verb. The agent performing the action may appear in a "by the..." phrase or may be omitted.

The sentence, the boy was bitten by the dog, shows the subject (the boy) is being acted upon by something or someone else (the dog). This is an example of a sentence using the passive voice.

The dog is acting upon the sentence subject (the boy), meaning it uses the passive voice.

The sentence subject (research) is being acted upon (presented) by another person (Pooja) in the sentence, research will be presented by Pooja at the conference. So, this sentence uses the passive voice.

This example sentence includes the passive voice because the subject (research) is being acted upon (presented) by another person (Pooja).

The sentence, the entrance exam was failed by over one-third of the applicants to the school, uses the passive voice because the subject (the entrance exam) is being acted upon (failed) by other people (over one-third of the applicants).

This is an example of the passive voice.

The sentence, I am reminded of watching a movie or TV by watching a framed, mobile world through a car's windshield, uses the passive voice since the subject (I) is acted upon by another sentence element (watching a framed, mobile world).

The subject of the passive voice sentence performs the action expressed in the verb in this example.

Reasons to Avoid Passive Voice

Sometimes the use of passive voice can create awkward sentences, as in the last example above. Also, overuse of passive voice throughout an essay can cause your prose to seem flat and uninteresting. In scientific writing, however, passive voice is more readily accepted since using it allows one to write without using personal pronouns or the names of particular researchers as the subjects of sentences (see the third example above). This practice helps to create the appearance of an objective, fact-based discourse because writers can present research and conclusions without attributing them to particular agents. Instead, the writing appears to convey information that is not limited or biased by individual perspectives or personal interests.

Recognizing Passive Voice

You can recognize passive-voice expressions because the verb phrase will always include a form of be, such as am, is, was, were, are, or been . The presence of a be-verb, however, does not necessarily mean that the sentence is in passive voice. Another way to recognize passive-voice sentences is that they may include a "by the..." phrase after the verb; the agent performing the action, if named, is the object of the preposition in this phrase.

Helpful Hint

You can recognize passive voice because the verb phrase will include a form of be (was, am, are, been, is). Don't assume that just because there is a form of 'be' that the sentence is passive, however. Sometimes a prepositional phrase like "by the" in the sentences above indicates that the action is performed on the subject, and that the sentence is passive.

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Your Writing “Voice”

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What Is Voice in an Academic Essay or Some Other Type of Composition?

Voice has at least two distinct meanings:

  • The audible sound of a person speaking (e.g., high-pitched, rhythmic, loud, soft, accent, pace). Even in writing, the author’s words create the “sound” of the writer talking. Effective writers can control the sound of their words in their readers’ heads.
  • The communicator’s implied beliefs and values. Every utterance conveys the impression of a person behind the words—a “self” that may be authentic or constructed as a persona. This “self” can extend beyond an implied personality to include the communicator’s political, philosophical, and social values as well as his or her commitment to certain causes (civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights).

Elements of Voice

Because audiences experience a communicator’s voice as a whole expression, not a set of parts, a reconsideration of some commonly understood elements of voice may be useful.

  • Tone. Tone is the communicator’s attitude toward the subject and audience as expressed in a text. For example, are you trying to convey anger, joy, sarcasm, contempt, anxiety, or respect? To gain control of your tone, read drafts aloud and listen to the attitudes you convey. Is the tone consistent throughout the text? Should it be? Have you struck the tone that you were hoping to strike?
  • Style. Style is the distinctive way you express yourself. It can change from day to day but it is always you. The style that you choose for a particular writing assignment will largely depend on your subject, purpose, and audience. Style in writing is affected by such values as the level of formality/informality appropriate to the situation and by the simplicity or complexity of words, sentences, and paragraphs. To gain control of style, learn to analyze the purpose and audience. Decide how you want to present yourself and ensure that it suits the occasion.
  • Values. Values include your political, social, religious, and philosophical beliefs. Your background, opinions, and beliefs will be part of everything you write, but you must learn when to express them directly and when not to. For example, including your values would enhance a personal essay or other autobiographical writing, but it might undermine a sense of objectivity in an interpretive or research paper. To gain control of the values in your writing, consider whether the purpose of the assignment calls for implicit or explicit value statements. Examine your drafts for opinion and judgment words that reveal your values and take them out if they are not appropriate.
  • Authority. Authority comes from knowledge and is projected through self-confidence. You can exert and project real authority only if you know your material well, whether it’s the facts of your life or carefully researched material. The better you know your subject (and this is often learned through drafting), the more authoritative you will sound. Your audience will hear that authority in your words.

What Is Voice in an Academic Essay?

Many students arrive at college with the notion that they must not use the first-person “I” point of view when writing an academic essay . The personal voice, so goes the reasoning, undermines the student writer’s authority by making the analysis or argument or whatever the student is writing seem too subjective or opinionated to be academic. The student who subscribes to this notion is correct—or possibly incorrect; it depends on how the assignment has been designed. One advantage of not using the first-person “I” is that it challenges the student to present ideas as objective claims, which will amplify the degree to which the claims require support to be convincing. Notice the different effects of these two claims:

I feel that Pablo Picasso’s reputation as a great artist conflicts with what his biographers have to say about his personal relationships, especially with women.  

Pablo Picasso’s reputation as a great artist conflicts with what his biographers have to say about his personal relationships, especially with women.  

      The only measurable difference between the two sentences above is that the first of them is couched in the first-person phrase “I feel.” The two sentences differ more consequentially in terms of effect, however. The writer—and readers—of the second sentence are probably going to sense more strongly the need for support to make the claim convincing. That’s a good thing, for it indicates to the writer the work that needs to be done to make the claim convincing.

      The disadvantage of keeping the first-person “I” voice out of an essay is that it may squelch something unique and authentic about the writer’s voice and vision, turning the essay into something more formal in tone—something more conventionally academic, let’s say. What is more, while denying the first-person “I” a place in an academic essay may heighten awareness of an essay’s argumentative weaknesses, it also participates in a tradition that privileges certain modes of thought and expression. The traditional ways of approaching academic essays, instructors are coming to accept, may be too limiting for today’s students.

      So, is the first-person “I” correct or incorrect? Ask your instructor this question before you begin writing your academic essay . Talk about what you need, in terms of voice, to convey your ideas most effectively.

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What’s a thesis, sample mla essays.

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Collaboration, information literacy, writing process, making sure your voice is present.

  • CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 by Kyle D. Stedman

The Terror of Voice

I like order. I love the comfort of a beautiful and functional Excel spreadsheet. I organize my CDs by genre and then alphabetically by artist. I eat three meals a day.

But my love of order sometimes butts heads with my love of writing. That’s because no matter how much attention I pay to following the rules of writing, I know that to produce writing that astounds readers—moving them, making them gasp, enticing them—I’ll have to include more than just  correct  writing. I’ll need to find a way to make my voice present.

And sometimes, that terrifies me with the uncertainty of it all. I sometimes wish writing excellently were like working in Excel. I know I can make a spreadsheet absolutely perfect if my formulas are coded properly and my data is lined up correctly. Writing excellently is messier than that: it means admitting the difficult truth that even when everything in my essay follows all the grammatical and mechanical rules, my writing can still lack qualities that will make my readers’ eyes pop out of their heads with delightful surprise.

I often tell my students that the difference between A -level and B -level writing is voice. In other words, essays often deserve B ’s even when they have perfect punctuation and grammar, an intriguing concept, brilliant ideas, excellent and well-integrated sources, and a Works Cited page that would earn a standing ovation at the annual MLA convention. An essay can have all of those things but still feel dry and voiceless, reading like a dying man trudging through the desert, sandal-slap after sandal-slap, lifeless sentence after lifeless sentence.

So What is Voice in Writing?

“Voice” is a weird term, right? We usually say your voice is the quality of how you sound when you talk out loud—but aren’t we talking about writing?

First, let’s think about everything that makes your speaking voice distinctive. It has its own aural quality, formed by the size of your mouth, throat, and tongue, along with your distinctive habits of how you use your body to manipulate the sound of the air exhaling from your lungs.

But beyond the sounds your body naturally produces through your mouth, you also have your own way of choosing words, and that’s part of your voice, too. You have words you use more often than others, phrases you rely on, and ways you make the musical tone of your voice go up and down in distinct ways. All of those choices are partly based on how you learned to speak in your family and culture, and they’re partly based on what you bring to the table as an individual. Sometimes you just let out whatever you’re thinking, and sometimes you pause to consider how you want to sound.

Don’t miss that: qualities of spoken voice are, to some extent, chosen . Depending on where and when and with whom we’re speaking, our voice can change.

Now let’s turn to writing. I would define voice in writing as the quality of writing that gives readers the impression that they are hearing a real person, not a machine . Voice in writing is therefore multifaceted: it’s partly an unconscious, natural ring that dwells in the words you write, but it’s also related to the words you choose (stuffy and overused or fresh and appealing?), the phrases you rely on (dictionary-like or lively?), and how you affect your readers’ emotions (bored or engaged?). And it’s not something that is magically there for some writers and not there for others. Voice is something that can be cultivated, practiced, watered, even designed.  

I’m reminded of a quote from poet D.A. Powell, which I heard on the trailer for a documentary called Bad Writing . He says, “Bad art is that which does not succeed in cleansing the language of its dead—stinking dead—usages of the past” (MorrisHillPictures). Voice in writing is like that: it gives readers the sense that they’re hearing a fresh, cleansed voice unlike any they’ve heard before.

The writing in this documentary is called “bad” because of its lack of an authentic voice.

We Need Voice in Academic Writing, Too

A common misconception among writers is that writing for college, especially in a fancy-looking, citation-filled essay, should have the complexity and difficulty of Pride and Prejudice : “She is all affability and condescension, and I doubt not but you will be honoured with some portion of her notice when service is over” (Austen). That is, we sometimes assume that academic writing is where we say things with big words and in roundabout ways that seem sort of something like what we imagine talk is like around a gilded dinner table in a palace, somewhere.

I think this assumption is wrong. Even when reading essays that were written for college classes, readers don’t want to be bored or confused. They want liveliness; they want voice. Listen to veteran writing teacher Donald Graves use all of his cute-old-man powers to beg you to use your personal voice in even your standardized writing tests:

Donald Graves on the importance of putting voice in your writing

I recently taught a class that focused entirely on blogging for the first thirteen weeks of the course, followed by a final academic essay at the end of the semester. Students regularly asked me what style they should adopt in their final essay, how formal to be, what kind of voice to adopt. To most of the students, my reply was, “Write it how you wrote your blog!” To which almost all of them said, “Huh? That was informal . This is formal .” To which I said, “You’re partly right. You paid less attention to details when you were blogging, sure, but your voices were there. You used sentences that sounded like you! They were resonant ! I was moved ! Do you hear the italics in my voice? That’s how good your writing was! So don’t lose that by putting on a new coat of formality when it doesn’t fit well!” As the one who was going to read their academic essays, I was afraid that I was going to get a bunch of essays that sounded like Pride and Prejudice , with big words and roundabout sentence constructions. I wanted big, complex ideas in these final essays, but I also wanted stylistic liveliness, sentences that made me sit up straight and open my eyes wide. I admit that after the students had written first drafts of their essays, I backed off a little, and we talked about the ways that formal writing situations do indeed demand a different kind of voice than a blog post—but I was always insistent that no writing situation called for bored readers.

You should know this: teachers talk about their students. And I’ve heard the following story, or some variant of it, something like twenty times: “My student wrote this awful draft that confused me to no end. So I emailed the student and told him to come in to my office to talk about it. And he gets there to my office and I say, ‘What are you trying to say on page 2?’ and he explains it, and—get this!—he explains it in this beautifully clear language, and it becomes clear that he knew all along what he wanted to talk about and how to defend it and even how his ideas relate to his sources. So I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you write it that way? Why don’t you write the way you talk?’ and you know what he says? He says, ‘Because I thought I was supposed to write formally.’ I swear, sometimes I think students get into more trouble trying to write formally than it’s worth.”

I’m serious. Every semester, I hear that story.

Of course, I see the other side: there’s a place for formality in a lot of writing. Depending on the circumstance, sometimes our most formal coat is indeed what we need to wear. In your future college classes, you might not get much of an idea from your professor about what kind of coat they expect you to wear, so you’ll probably have to do some asking. (“Dear Professor X, I’m baffled about what kind of voice to use in my essay. For example, may I write the word baffled ? Please send examples. Sincerely, Judy Jetson.”)

My favorite trick here is one I learned from a small writing textbook called They Say, I Say : purposefully mixing the formal and informal in a single sentence or two. If you want to talk about something using a formal term, which is often a good idea in formal writing, use the formal term but then turn around and say it again informally. Like this: “Spoken voice is affected by our use of the epithelium, the vocal ligament, and the vocalis muscle. We’ve got a lot of ways to make sound.” The authors of They Say, I Say remind us that “translating the one type of language into the other, the specialized into the everyday, can help drive home a point” (Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst 118).

That leads me to the stuff you’re probably here for: actual ideas about how to get this elusive thing called voice into your writing.

Suggestions

1. Trust the gush—but then come back to the gush with a critical eye.

In one of my favorite articles about voice in writing, writing scholar Tom Romano tells the story of a student who turned in a piece of paper with the words “TRUST THE GUSH” messily scribbled on it. Romano expounds on what the phrase means to him:

Trusting the gush means moving on the heat quickening in you. Trusting the gush means being fearless with language. Trusting the gush means writing about what you are emotionally moved by and perhaps don’t even know why. Trusting the gush means putting onto the page those thoughts, connections, and perceptions that stand ready to be uttered. (51)

It’s beautiful advice that feels true to me. I’ve had times where I turn off the screen of my computer and write with no visual reference, letting words gush out of me in their most natural, voice-filled way.   

But remember how I said that voice isn’t just natural, it’s also constructed for specific occasions? My gush is usually full of some good, usable words, phrases, and sentences, but it’s also a big, gushy mess. So that’s when I back away for a bit of time (more than a day, if possible), returning later to my gush in search of the lines that seem most lively, most full of voice, the ones that fit best into my current writing context.

2. Don’t be afraid to use some of speech’s informalities, but always punctuate them in formal ways.

Sometimes students ask if they can use contractions in their academic essays, and I always say yes—but then I regret it when I get “theyre not understanding” and “he said your not smart enough” in submitted work. But on the flip side, I find I’m more willing to be lenient with student writing that is slightly too informal for my taste when the writer shows that they know what they’re doing with their punctuation. Life is like that, you know? If you take one step of goodwill (knowing your punctuation), people want to give you lenience in other areas (accepting informality, even if it seems to step over the line).

This advice extends to colons (never mistaking them for semicolons and never using a hyphen as a colon), em-dashes (using them wisely and punctuating them perfectly, as two hyphens between two words and no spaces at all), and commas (especially when someone is being addressed, as in “I agree, Mr. President” and when introducing a quotation immediately after a verb, such as when I write, “Yessiree”).

3. Read your work aloud—and don’t be afraid to have fun with it.

I tell students to read their stuff aloud all the time, and usually I get a scared, silent look in return. (I think this look might mean, “Do you have any idea how stupid I would look if someone walked in while I was talking to myself?”) Well, fine—play around with it:

  • Read your own stuff aloud to yourself. I like to do this after printing it out. Listen for places where you stumble, where you seem to be saying the same word over and over, where you think you might be boring. Peter Elbow justifies this well :

I find that when students have the repeated experience of reading their writing aloud, they are more likely to write sentences that are inviting and comfortable to recite—which in turn makes the sentences better for readers who get them in silence. Putting this differently, the sound of written words when spoken is a crucial benefit for silent readers, yet too few students hear the words they write. When they have to read their writing aloud frequently and thus hear it, they tend to listen more as they write—and readers hear more meaning as they read. (5)

  • Have someone else read your stuff aloud to you, with another copy in front of yourself to follow along with and mark spots that feel voiceless. Ask your friend what sounded best, what they most remember on the sentence level, where it sounded like you .
  • Play The Boring Game: have three people sit down, each with a piece of paper with a line drawn through the middle; this is The Boring Line. Make one person the timekeeper. Start reading your essay out loud to them, and ask the timekeeper to raise his hand every thirty seconds. At those moments, the readers all make a dot on the paper to show how bored they are; a dot way above the boring line means they’re absolutely engaged, as if beautiful aliens had just transported into the room, while a dot way below the boring line means they’re wondering why they agreed to play the stupid boring game with you. After the essay is done, ask them to connect the dots, showing you a line of where they were relatively more or less bored. Talk to them to help identify what parts of the essay bored them; you probably didn’t have much voice in those spots.

4. Surprise Your Readers

I’m serious: make sure that throughout your piece, every once in a while you throw in a word or phrase that makes you think, “I bet they never saw that one coming!” (In this piece that you’re reading now, one of my attempts at that is my first heading, “The Terror of Voice.” I’m counting on readers thinking, “Wait, the terror of voice? . . . I’m confused! I’d better read on to figure out what he means!”)

My guess is that with a little practice, this won’t be too hard to achieve. You could read through a draft of something and highlight (either on paper or the computer) every place where you think you’re breaking the expectation of your reader in a surprising way, whether because of the topic you chose to dive into or because of a phrase or sentence they might not have seen coming. Then you skim back through and find places without any highlights around, and try to work something in there.

As with most of my suggestions, this can backfire if you take it too far, which is why I think playing The Boring Game (above) is so important, so you can feel out your choices with real people. Obviously, your readers will be surprised if you start slamming sexually explicit words onto the screen, but that’s clearly not the kind of voice I’m talking about. Less dramatically, I’ve been in situations where I go for a strong, surprising personal voice and later discover (on my own, or with the help of someone else) that it’s just not working for that audience.

This happened to me recently when I was writing a piece about integrating sources into essays. I worked up this detailed analogy involving Jane Austen, gardens, statues, and helicopters (seriously), and I even kept the analogy through a few drafts. But a friend, whom I had asked to read my draft, told me she was a little confused by the whole thing. At first I ignored her—I was being surprising! There were helicopters— helicopters ! But eventually, I realized she was right; I had to back down and rework my surprising analogy into something that just plain made more sense. The revised version was still surprising (involving Spider-Man), but it was surprising and it worked . There’s a difference.

5. Use Rhetorical Figures to Help Shape Your Sentences

Sometimes we hear or read something and say, “Wow, there was so much power in those words!” And sometimes, we fall for a common lie: we think that powerful speakers and writers are just plain born that way, that their skill comes from some indefinable something that they have and we don’t.

I like rhetorical figures because they expose that thinking as a lie.

Since the days of classical Greece and Rome, instructors in rhetoric have realized that this lie existed, so they formulated organized ways of figuring out what exactly makes some speaking and writing feel so powerful. They labeled these terms and encouraged their students to try using these sentence forms in their own sentences. Here are some examples, all of which are direct quotes from Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric , an awesome site at http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ (Burton):

  • anaphora : Repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines. Example: This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings.
  • asyndeton : The omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect. Example: Veni, vidi, vici (Caesar: “I came; I saw; I conquered”)
  • epitasis : The addition of a concluding sentence that merely emphasizes what has already been stated. Example: Clean your bedroom. All of it.

These and dozens of others are available at Silva Rhetoricae and at the (somewhat more manageable) American Rhetoric site, especially the page on “ Rhetorical Figures in Sound ” (Eidenmuller).

The idea is to force yourself to try setting up a sentence or two following the guidelines of one of the rhetorical figures, and then to sit back and gauge the result for yourself. Often, I think you’ll be impressed with how excellent you sound, with a very present and powerful tone of voice.

The Terror of Practice

In the end, there’s one more terrifying thing about writing with voice: it’s unlikely that you’ll see a huge change without lots of practice. And that means lots of writing. And that means time. Which you might not have.

So I’m closing with a word of moderation. To see a change in your writing voice in just a short semester, you’ll need to think about voice in every piece of writing you do. Shooting off a quick Blackboard forum response? Try using a rhetorical figure. Confirming a meeting time with a friend over text message? Try to surprise them with an unexpected phrase. Writing an in-class essay? Read it over slowly in your head, paying careful attention to how it would sound if you read it out loud. (Or, if your teacher lets you, just read it out loud there in the classroom. This is unlikely.) Writing an essay draft that feels like busy-work? Play around with how you might perfectly punctuate some informal language (and don’t be afraid to ask your teacher if you did it correctly).

Even though a YouTube search for “voice in writing” will give you lots of good advice—including one devastatingly cute video of young kids baking brownies while the “Word Chef” talks about what makes for a strong voice in a book about a cockroach (teachertubewriting)—there really is no substitute for practice. Thinking about writing is never, ever the same as practicing writing.

And most of all, breathe. Our voice comes from our breath, the life that flows from our bodies into the minds of our listeners. Shape it, practice it, use it for good. (That’s asyndeton—did you catch it?)

Brevity – Say More with Less

Brevity – Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence – How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Coherence – How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Diction

Flow – How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity – Inclusive Language

Inclusivity – Inclusive Language

Simplicity

The Elements of Style – The DNA of Powerful Writing

Unity

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Critical writing: Your voice

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“When academics write articles... they not only present their own ideas but also refer to the ideas of other academics. This means that they need a way to distinguish between their own ideas and the ideas of other people. They need to express their own voice and to refer to the voices of others.” Brick et al. (2019), Academic Success

Academic writing can feel incredibly disempowering. Students often feel they spend all of their time writing about the work of others, without ever demonstrating what they know or think. This is not the case. While all academic arguments must be based on appropriate evidence (references), you decide what evidence to include. You also decide how to critique or support every source you include. This is how your voice comes through in academic writing.

A critical aspect of higher education is the development of knowledge through debate and discourse. Good academic writing uses a mixture of the voices. In practical terms, this includes a blend of your voice and the voice of others . Whenever you are using the work of someone else, this must be appropriately cited and referenced. Referencing is an important part of voice as it helps to distinguish between your ideas and the ideas of others . 

The four different voices of academic writing

There are four different types of voice that are used within academic writing:

  • Own voice : An original point or claim written by the author of this work, or an aspect of analysis, synthesis or evaluation that comments on the work of others.
  • External voice : The writer summarises or paraphrases the work of someone else. Their name is not mentioned directly in the text and the relevant source is represented through citation. 
  • Indirect voice:  The writer summarises or paraphrases the work of someone else. Their name is mentioned in text and the source is appropriated cited.
  • Direct voice:  The writer directly quotes the work of someone else. Their direct words are reproduced, their name is mentioned in text and the source is appropriated cited. 

There are four voices in academic writing: Own voice, external voice, indirect voice and direct voice.

Example: Using different voices 

Let's look at a sample piece of level 5 writing to look at some of the different types of voice:

Public concern for food safety steadily grew from the 1970's onwards as food poisoning events increased. As these public concerns rose, the term ‘food scare’ started to appear in the media (Knowles et al, 2007). According to Campbell and Fitzgerald (2001), food scares were first associated with the malicious lacing of tablets with cyanide in mid-1980s USA, but once coined, soon became applied to the varied food safety issues that arose over subsequent years. Through this the media began to start portraying uncertainty over food safety, which has led to a wide variety of public responses. This is because "no unequivocal evidence is available for determining the role of socio-demographic characteristics in processing food safety information" (Mazzocchi et al., 2008:3). This means...

(Excerpt from: Fallin, 2009)

In this short except, all four types of voice are used.

The use of different voices is an essential aspect of the above excerpt's developing academic argument. As important as the evidence is, this must be articulated in the context of the argument - in this case, demonstrating public concern for food poisoning events. For this reason, the author's own voice is used as part of the argument and narrative. 

Writer's own voice

The writer opens with a sentence to introduce their point. There is no need to reference this opening point as it will be argued within the paragraph - with the use of appropriate academic evidence. 

Public concern for food safety steadily grew from the 1970's onwards as food poisoning events increased. 

External voice

The writer then uses the  external voice . This is because the author has fully summerised the work of Knowles, which is referenced using an in-text citation in Harvard/APA style. Knowles name is not mentioned in the main narrative of the text, but is appropriately cited in brackets. 

As these public concerns rose, the term ‘food scare’ started to appear in the media (Knowles et al, 2007).

Indirect voice

The writer's next sentence uses the  indirect voice . This is because they mention Campell and Fitzgernald by name, but go on to user their own words to summerise the work of these authors. Campell and Fitzgernald are appropriates cited to indicate the origin of this idea.

According to Campbell and Fitzgerald (2001), food scared were first associated with the malicious lacing of tablets with cyanide in mid-1980s USA, but once coined, soon became applied to the varied food safety issues that arose over subsequent years.

The writer has then again, used their voice to synthesis the evidence so far - and link to their next point. There is no need to reference this as it is build upon the above evidence. 

Through this the media began to start portraying uncertainty over food safety, which has led to a wide variety of public responses. 

Direct voice

The writer then goes on to use the  direct voice . This is because they directly quote the work of Mazzocchi et al., using the authors exact words. This is represented by the quotation marks and is appropriately referenced. 

This is because "no unequivocal evidence is available for determining the role of socio-demographic characteristics in processing food safety information" (Mazzocchi et al., 2008:3). 

Activity: Identifying different voices

As you have seen from this page so far, the use of different academic voices is an essential aspect of both academic integrity (citations/referencing) and critical thinking (building an argument). As your writing develops, so will your use of voice. However, it is also important to be able to identify these voices in your reading. This will support you in identifying the argument of others - and the sources of evidence for them. 

For this activity we will look at a piece of level 7 work and try to identify the different use of voice. Read the text below, and try to identify the different use of academic voice. Once you've finished your analysis, look at the next tab for the answers.

  • Sample text
  • Sample text + analysis

 To develop an online learning community, it is essential that inductions are offered to both new and existing students, regardless of their elearning experience. The reason for this is while a learner may have extensive experience of the pedagogical approach of online teaching, they may still be new to each other and/or to the particular virtual learning (Salmon, 2011). Similarly, while the learners may be familiar to working with one another as a team, they may not be familiar to the environment or online learning as a whole. Therefore, the etutor cannot become complacent with social inductions; one demonstration of this came from a colleague, Emmett (2012), who made the following observation:   “'bonding' as a group online is different from just talking to each other face to face in quite formal monthly meetings”  This demonstrates the need to form a new dynamic online and relearn how to work together. According to Salmon (2011), even a group familiar to online learning needs to go through certain steps with each unique activity they undertake to reframe their roles and responsibilities. An important part of this is giving the learners the opportunity to set boundaries and ground rules. By drafting a common set of rules, they are given part ownership of their own governance and can develop something to suit their professional and/or learning context (Lewis & Allan, 2005). This further demonstrates the importance of induction for online learners.

(Excerpt from: Fallin, 2015)

i am writing an essay change the voice

Voice, discipline and level

You will find different disciplines use voice in different ways. This is something you will identify the more you engage with the literature in your field. Your assessments are also an opportunity to develop this, and you will recieve feedback/feedforward from your lecturers and tutors to help you develop your writing in your field. 

There is a great variation in how disciplines may approach voice, but here are some general overviews. 

  • Sciences favour external voice and own voice above that of indirect and direct voice. In fact, it is very rare you will find the direct voice in scientific writing. Sciences tend to focus on the re-articulation of core information and knowledge in the context of the current work. There is also less of a focus over who is involved in the work, so the use of the indirect voice is also rare. This is because citations are used to identify authorship, and this is not needed in the narrative. 
  • Social sciences  will often use a mix of all voices, though the balance will depend on the work in question. While the external and own voice are the staple, there is a greater appreciation for theory and authorship, so the indirect voice is also common. There is still a focus on avoiding the use of direct voice (quotations) wherever possible, but they are appreciated where the context requires them. 
  • Arts and humanities  also used a mix of all voices. There is a greater allowance for the direct voice, especially when quoting original or historical work for the purpose of analysis - but not as a means of padding out work. There must be synthesis and analysis for any use of the direct voice.

Level of study

It is also fair to say that your use of voice will vary heavily by level of study. For example, level 4 study generally focuses on acquiring core disciplinary knowledge. At this phase of your studies, your own voice is still developing, and you may find your use of the external, indirect and direct voice is greater. This inevitably rebalances at higher levels of study. By level 6 and 7 you should have really developed your own voice as a way to synthesis and narrate the ideas of others (presented in the other three voices). 

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  • Tips & Guides

How To Avoid Using “We,” “You,” And “I” in an Essay

  • Posted on October 27, 2022 October 27, 2022

Maintaining a formal voice while writing academic essays and papers is essential to sound objective. 

One of the main rules of academic or formal writing is to avoid first-person pronouns like “we,” “you,” and “I.” These words pull focus away from the topic and shift it to the speaker – the opposite of your goal.

While it may seem difficult at first, some tricks can help you avoid personal language and keep a professional tone.

Let’s learn how to avoid using “we” in an essay.

What Is a Personal Pronoun?

Pronouns are words used to refer to a noun indirectly. Examples include “he,” “his,” “her,” and “hers.” Any time you refer to a noun – whether a person, object, or animal – without using its name, you use a pronoun.

Personal pronouns are a type of pronoun. A personal pronoun is a pronoun you use whenever you directly refer to the subject of the sentence. 

Take the following short paragraph as an example:

“Mr. Smith told the class yesterday to work on our essays. Mr. Smith also said that Mr. Smith lost Mr. Smith’s laptop in the lunchroom.”

The above sentence contains no pronouns at all. There are three places where you would insert a pronoun, but only two where you would put a personal pronoun. See the revised sentence below:

“Mr. Smith told the class yesterday to work on our essays. He also said that he lost his laptop in the lunchroom.”

“He” is a personal pronoun because we are talking directly about Mr. Smith. “His” is not a personal pronoun (it’s a possessive pronoun) because we are not speaking directly about Mr. Smith. Rather, we are talking about Mr. Smith’s laptop.

If later on you talk about Mr. Smith’s laptop, you may say:

“Mr. Smith found it in his car, not the lunchroom!” 

In this case, “it” is a personal pronoun because in this point of view we are making a reference to the laptop directly and not as something owned by Mr. Smith.

Why Avoid Personal Pronouns in Essay Writing

We’re teaching you how to avoid using “I” in writing, but why is this necessary? Academic writing aims to focus on a clear topic, sound objective, and paint the writer as a source of authority. Word choice can significantly impact your success in achieving these goals.

Writing that uses personal pronouns can unintentionally shift the reader’s focus onto the writer, pulling their focus away from the topic at hand.

Personal pronouns may also make your work seem less objective. 

One of the most challenging parts of essay writing is learning which words to avoid and how to avoid them. Fortunately, following a few simple tricks, you can master the English Language and write like a pro in no time.

Alternatives To Using Personal Pronouns

How to not use “I” in a paper? What are the alternatives? There are many ways to avoid the use of personal pronouns in academic writing. By shifting your word choice and sentence structure, you can keep the overall meaning of your sentences while re-shaping your tone.

Utilize Passive Voice

In conventional writing, students are taught to avoid the passive voice as much as possible, but it can be an excellent way to avoid first-person pronouns in academic writing.

You can use the passive voice to avoid using pronouns. Take this sentence, for example:

“ We used 150 ml of HCl for the experiment.”

Instead of using “we” and the active voice, you can use a passive voice without a pronoun. The sentence above becomes:

“150 ml of HCl were used for the experiment.” 

Using the passive voice removes your team from the experiment and makes your work sound more objective.

Take a Third-Person Perspective

Another answer to “how to avoid using ‘we’ in an essay?” is the use of a third-person perspective. Changing the perspective is a good way to take first-person pronouns out of a sentence. A third-person point of view will not use any first-person pronouns because the information is not given from the speaker’s perspective.

A third-person sentence is spoken entirely about the subject where the speaker is outside of the sentence.

Take a look at the sentence below:

“In this article you will learn about formal writing.”

The perspective in that sentence is second person, and it uses the personal pronoun “you.” You can change this sentence to sound more objective by using third-person pronouns:

“In this article the reader will learn about formal writing.”

The use of a third-person point of view makes the second sentence sound more academic and confident. Second-person pronouns, like those used in the first sentence, sound less formal and objective.

Be Specific With Word Choice

You can avoid first-personal pronouns by choosing your words carefully. Often, you may find that you are inserting unnecessary nouns into your work. 

Take the following sentence as an example:

“ My research shows the students did poorly on the test.”

In this case, the first-person pronoun ‘my’ can be entirely cut out from the sentence. It then becomes:

“Research shows the students did poorly on the test.”

The second sentence is more succinct and sounds more authoritative without changing the sentence structure.

You should also make sure to watch out for the improper use of adverbs and nouns. Being careful with your word choice regarding nouns, adverbs, verbs, and adjectives can help mitigate your use of personal pronouns. 

“They bravely started the French revolution in 1789.” 

While this sentence might be fine in a story about the revolution, an essay or academic piece should only focus on the facts. The world ‘bravely’ is a good indicator that you are inserting unnecessary personal pronouns into your work.

We can revise this sentence into:

“The French revolution started in 1789.” 

Avoid adverbs (adjectives that describe verbs), and you will find that you avoid personal pronouns by default.

Closing Thoughts

In academic writing, It is crucial to sound objective and focus on the topic. Using personal pronouns pulls the focus away from the subject and makes writing sound subjective.

Hopefully, this article has helped you learn how to avoid using “we” in an essay.

When working on any formal writing assignment, avoid personal pronouns and informal language as much as possible.

While getting the hang of academic writing, you will likely make some mistakes, so revising is vital. Always double-check for personal pronouns, plagiarism , spelling mistakes, and correctly cited pieces. 

 You can prevent and correct mistakes using a plagiarism checker at any time, completely for free.

Quetext is a platform that helps you with all those tasks. Check out all resources that are available to you today.

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The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay | Steps & Examples

An academic essay is a focused piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation.

There are many types of essays you might write as a student. The content and length of an essay depends on your level, subject of study, and course requirements. However, most essays at university level are argumentative — they aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.

The essay writing process consists of three main stages:

  • Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline.
  • Writing : Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion.
  • Revision:  Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling, and formatting of your essay.

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Table of contents

Essay writing process, preparation for writing an essay, writing the introduction, writing the main body, writing the conclusion, essay checklist, lecture slides, frequently asked questions about writing an essay.

The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay .

For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

  • Understand your assignment: What is the goal of this essay? What is the length and deadline of the assignment? Is there anything you need to clarify with your teacher or professor?
  • Define a topic: If you’re allowed to choose your own topic , try to pick something that you already know a bit about and that will hold your interest.
  • Do your research: Read  primary and secondary sources and take notes to help you work out your position and angle on the topic. You’ll use these as evidence for your points.
  • Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
  • Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

1. Hook your reader

The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

3. Present the thesis statement

Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Write your essay introduction

The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

Length of the body text

The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

Paragraph structure

To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

That idea is introduced in a  topic sentence . The topic sentence should generally lead on from the previous paragraph and introduce the point to be made in this paragraph. Transition words can be used to create clear connections between sentences.

After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

See the full essay example

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The conclusion is the final paragraph of an essay. It should generally take up no more than 10–15% of the text . A strong essay conclusion :

  • Returns to your thesis
  • Ties together your main points
  • Shows why your argument matters

A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

What not to include in a conclusion

To make your essay’s conclusion as strong as possible, there are a few things you should avoid. The most common mistakes are:

  • Including new arguments or evidence
  • Undermining your arguments (e.g. “This is just one approach of many”)
  • Using concluding phrases like “To sum up…” or “In conclusion…”

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Write your essay conclusion

Checklist: Essay

My essay follows the requirements of the assignment (topic and length ).

My introduction sparks the reader’s interest and provides any necessary background information on the topic.

My introduction contains a thesis statement that states the focus and position of the essay.

I use paragraphs to structure the essay.

I use topic sentences to introduce each paragraph.

Each paragraph has a single focus and a clear connection to the thesis statement.

I make clear transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

My conclusion doesn’t just repeat my points, but draws connections between arguments.

I don’t introduce new arguments or evidence in the conclusion.

I have given an in-text citation for every quote or piece of information I got from another source.

I have included a reference page at the end of my essay, listing full details of all my sources.

My citations and references are correctly formatted according to the required citation style .

My essay has an interesting and informative title.

I have followed all formatting guidelines (e.g. font, page numbers, line spacing).

Your essay meets all the most important requirements. Our editors can give it a final check to help you submit with confidence.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

  • An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
  • Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
  • A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

  • It gives your writing direction and focus.
  • It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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Mastering Tone of Voice: How Successful Writers Engage Audiences

Mastering Tone of Voice: How Successful Writers Engage Audiences

Table of contents

i am writing an essay change the voice

Phoenix Bunke

Have you ever read an essay, article, or blog post that just seemed… meh ? Interesting ideas, yet somehow forgettable?

As an editor, I’ve read hundreds of essays, articles, and blog posts that needed a little extra push toward greatness. And I’ve found that understanding tone of voice is one of the keys to fixing forgettable writing. Choosing the right tone for a piece is an underrated yet crucial skill that can help engage readers by adding emotional interest and subtext.

In this article, I’ll share some of my trade secrets on tone. I’ll offer various tone examples and include a framework that will help you home in on the right tonal choice for any piece — from essays to social media content — and take your writing to the next level.

What Is Tone of Voice?

Tone of voice is the attitude your writing conveys to others — be it respectful, serious, playful, or dramatic. It gives your writing “flavor” by showing nuanced emotions.

We express how we feel in person in many ways — facial expressions, body language, word choice, etc — and our tone changes with context. For instance, when speaking to your boss, you might stand up straight, make eye contact, and avoid negative language. However, with a child you’re likely to speak simply and enthusiastically (and probably make some silly noises).

Your writing can’t convey body language or the sound of your voice, but it’s still possible to send emotional cues. In fact, almost every part of your writing can be tweaked to affect how your tone is perceived, including the following:

  • Word choice
  • Sentence structure and length
  • Grammatical correctness (or lack thereof)
  • Use of emoji
  • Punctuation
  • Choice of content (images, facts, topics, discussion of emotions, etc.)
  • Point of view (first person, third person, etc.)

Why Does Tone of Voice Matter?

No matter who you are writing for, your tone of voice affects your ability to connect with them. A tone that doesn’t match the situation — such as being overly casual on a job application — can make you seem misguided, while the appropriate tone can create an emotional connection with readers and generate feelings of respect or empathy.

If you’re a student , utilizing the correct tone can show respect to your teachers and demonstrate higher-level writing skills.

If you’re a researcher , using a tone that matches your peers will help people take your work seriously and gain you respect in your field.

If you’re writing for social media or marketing , you can draw your ideal subscribers in with a voice that speaks to them. When your brand uses a tone that customers find relatable or authoritative, they’re more likely to trust your advice and ultimately buy from you. 

Choosing a unique or surprising tone is also a fantastic way to make yourself stand out from the crowd. Just ask Duolingo, the language-learning app that went viral for its TikToks featuring an arguably unhinged owl mascot. While it’s far from “professional,” Duo’s Gen Z slang and bizarre humor clearly resonate with its millions of viewers. 

@duolingo Ugh we did a thing, AI learning slay #duolingomax #ailearning #duolingo ♬ Bootycrack hole - Jenos_rightpinky_toe

Different Types of Tone of Voice

To move from abstract concept to concrete practice, here are some examples of a variety of tones, what creates them, and when they might be appropriate. 

Formal vs Casual

Formal: To whom it may concern

Casual: Hey there :)

The level of formality needed in your writing depends on your relationship with the reader. For instance, this formal abstract from an article on marketing and emotion is ideal for submitting to an academic publisher, but would probably fall flat on your personal Instagram feed.

Screenshot of an abstract for a research paper titled “The Role of Emotions in Advertising: A Call to Action.” The first line reads: “Emotions play a central role in advertising.”

Larger, more complex words and longer sentences can help create a formal tone. Though, too much of this can sound stuffy and make your writing hard to understand. Correct grammar is an absolute must. 

For casual writing, including one or two emoji keeps things light. Minor grammar infractions, especially sentence fragments — using a phrase on its own with full sentence punctuation, even if it does not include both a noun and a verb — can be really useful here. You’ll often find them in marketing copy: Elegant. Powerful. Not your average stroller.

In the Wordtune Editor , our AI-powered writing assistant, you can highlight your text and click Casual or Formal to see a list of suggestions for these tones.

An image of Wordtune’s editor tool making formal tone suggestions.

Funny vs Serious

Funny: I'm going to get my degree in procrastination — I already have a master's! Serious: Earning a college degree can be an important step in your career.

Choosing whether to be funny or serious depends on your goals. 

If you want to show respect or inspire urgent action on a problem, a serious approach may work best. Use correct grammar and more formal language, avoid jokes or asides, and focus on the consequences of your topic for the audience. Though many serious pieces, such as news or academic articles, focus mostly on facts, serious writing doesn’t have to avoid emotions. Just be sure to acknowledge them with dignity. 

On the other hand, if you want to catch people’s attention without stressing them, humor can be a great tool. It can help you relate to your audience, make a point, or lighten otherwise heavy information.

You might do this by using informal language and adding a joke or two. Consider the many flavors of funny: would you rather be sarcastic, goofy, clever, or ironic? Feel free to use slang, silly, or risqué words that would be out of place in an essay ( Bangin’ , adorkable , ogle , or oodles , anyone?).

Clothing company MeUndies opts for a cheeky tone (see what I did there) when asking users to sign up for SMS alerts by teasing, “We can't promise we won't butt dial.”

Screenshot of the call to action links from an email from MeUndies.

Matter-of-Fact vs Enthusiastic

Matter-of-Fact: Your order has been delivered.

Enthusiastic: Your order is on its way! Woo!!

Another tonal difference to focus on is the level of excitement your text needs to convey. For how-tos, product manuals, and essays, a matter-of-fact tone can benefit readers who want to get right to the point. You’ll want to cut extra descriptor words, remove all repetition, and keep sentences short.

On the other hand, for social media or blog posts, an enthusiastic tone can help create a buzz and get people excited about your topic.

Print company MOO differentiates itself from competitors by using a friendly and excited tone that communicates personal care for its customers.

Screenshot of an email from MOO that reads, “I’m excited to say Big MOO has printed your order and it’ll shortly be dispatched from our warehouse. Yay!”

To show excitement, pile on the modifiers! Feel free to describe your own emotions, and don’t forget interjections like wow or oops . A change in punctuation can also add extra energy:

Excited: We guarantee our slippers will rock your socks off!

A bit more excited: We guarantee our slippers will rock. Your. Socks. Off!

How to Choose the Best Tone for Any Piece of Writing

For students, researchers, and marketers, the key to using tone of voice is understanding who your audience is and knowing what kind of relationship with them you are aiming for . With this in mind, you should be able to find a voice that will “speak” to them.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Before you begin writing, ask yourself these three questions.

A.    Who am I writing for?

This could be one person, like the teacher who will be reading your essay. Or it could be a group, like teenagers wondering if they have ADHD. Try to be as specific as possible.

You may want to research your target audience. Consider how they might speak in certain contexts and what they want that your writing can offer them.

B.    What is my relationship to my audience?

Your tone should reflect whether you are in a position of authority versus if you are speaking to someone with a higher status than you. If you don’t currently have a relationship with them, think of what relationship you're aiming for — a seller-customer relationship, for instance. This can clarify what tones of voice may be socially appropriate, as it’s more acceptable to write with and share emotion in some situations than in others. 

C.    How do I want people to feel about me and my piece?

Do you want to make strangers feel like your close friends? Is it more important to you to catch people’s attention and shock them, or to show that you are factually accurate?

Your tone should support the kinds of emotions you’d like people to feel about you and your subject, and it should reflect how much emotion is considered appropriate for the situation. 

If you want to appear as a trustworthy job candidate, a formal, confident, and matter-of-fact tone that avoids most emotion would be a good goal. If you want people to get excited to buy refurbished vintage furniture, a personal, enthusiastic tone might hit the spot.

 2. Define Your Tone of Voice

With the answers to your questions in mind, brainstorm a tone that will best connect you to your audience, and write down some keywords that define it.

See how the MeUndies brand ambassadors page clearly defines the tone of voice the company uses in its marketing with the line, “#TeamCheeks Ambassadors are authentic, charismatic, and enthusiastic creators who can help bring the playful energy of our brand to life.”

Screenshot of the MeUndies website page advertising for Brand Ambassadors.

3. Develop a Clear Style Guide

Find examples of the tone of voice you would like to achieve and study them. Make notes on how these examples create the tone you're looking for. 

This could include word choice, sentence structure, the type of jokes being made, emoji use (or lack thereof), and more. It can also include their choices of content — lots of images, specific topics, how-tos, etc.

Once you begin to see the patterns, write them down as a set of rough guidelines.

For the Wordtune blog, we have a detailed style guide that every writer follows to ensure all our blog posts have a consistent voice. But your style guide doesn’t need to be complicated as long as it helps you write.

4. Do Regular Reviews

Regularly reviewing your work and checking it against your style guide can keep you on target as you develop your tone.

If you can, ask some friends and colleagues to read your piece and share feedback on what “feeling” they’re picking up. Then, you can work on further developing your tone if needed.

When writing in the Wordtune editor, highlight text and click the Casual or Formal buttons to see which tone your writing resembles most and decide if it’s in line with your goals.

Whether you’re striving to perfect an essay or prove yourself as a content creator, tone of voice can help you form an emotional connection with your readers. While you can’t literally communicate vocal tones in your writing, your choice of words, sentence structure, punctuation, and use of emoji — just to name a few — can create distinct experiences for your readers and add an emotional zing to bland writing.

Remember to focus on who you’re writing for, the relationship you want to have with them, and the reasons you’re writing in the first place. Using these guidelines, your own style guide, and Wordtune’s tools can help you develop a strong voice that differentiates you from the competition and adds vital emotional resonance to your work.   

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How can I effectively balance ‘voice’ in my writing?

i am writing an essay change the voice

This is the third and final chapter about Balancing Voices . To complete this reader, read each chapter carefully and then unlock and complete our materials to check your understanding.   

– Provide guidance on how to effectively balance ‘voice’

– Highlight the balance of voice through an example paragraph

– Use a chart to explain the twelve purposes of voice

Chapter 1: Why is ‘voice’ important in academic writing?

Chapter 2: What are the three different types of ‘voice’?

Chapter 3: How can I effectively balance ‘voice’ in my writing?

This third and final chapter on voice in academic writing deals with two aspects that should be recognised and employed by an academic. The first aspect is that an essay must have an effective balance of voice to be considered successful. To do this, a writer must also recognise the second aspect, which is that each of the three voice types are generally used for different purposes when writing academically.

1. Balancing Voice

A well-written academic essay tends to have a good balance of writer voice , mixed voice and source voice in each paragraph . Generally speaking, the writer’s voice usually accounts for about 40% of each body paragraph , with the remaining 60% being used to introduce evidence and support through  mixed and source voice . Of course, for introductory and concluding paragraphs, the ratio of writer voice will be much higher as few sources are introduced outside of the body section.

To demonstrate the balance of voice in a body paragraph , we’ve included the first body paragraph from our example cause and effect essay and highlighted the writer voice in green , the mixed voice in blue and the source voice in red :

The most pedagogically valid reason that universities may have introduced preliminary year programmes is likely due to the fact that non-native students were often reported to be struggling to meet the linguistic demands of their major. In a study of 113 universities in the USA, Smith and Wesson (2000) found that dropout rates for non-native speakers of English at English-medium universities were as high as 24%. This research stimulated subsequent studies which all found that student concerns over course comprehension were a recurrent factor for these high rates (Davidson, 2001; Lee and Lee, 2004). Indeed, Johnson (2009) argues that such linguistic demands were in fact the primary reason for most cases of non-native dropouts around the turn of the millennium. In relation to this aspect, one significant effect of introducing preliminary-year programmes may be that students are now better prepared for their courses and dropout rates have decreased. In the same study, Johnson (2009) reported a decrease in dropout rates of 57% after the introduction of the preliminary year. Students have also since reported feeling more confident and comfortable with comprehending the concepts of their course (Jones, 2014), which perhaps indicates that extending bachelor’s degree programmes by a year has had a positive effect.

This paragraph has a good balance of voice , with the writer’s voice accounting for 80 of 204 words. This is roughly 39%, which is an appropriate amount for a body paragraph . The combination of  mixed and source voice together is also appropriately balanced, containing roughly 61% of the total paragraph.

2. Understanding Voice Purpose

The final aspect of understanding how to balance voice is in recognising that each of the three voice types we discussed in Chapter 2 may be used for different purposes. The following table has been created to quickly demonstrate how writer voice ( WV ), mixed voice ( MV ) and source voice ( SV ) are generally used to introduce the various elements of an academic essay. A single tick shows that that particular voice type may sometimes be used for a certain element, a double tick shows that voice as being commonly used for an element, while a cross highlights when in that situation a particular voice type is generally unused:

Voice 3.1 Using Voice in Academic Writing

Downloadables

Once you’ve completed all three chapters about voice , you might also wish to download our beginner, intermediate and advanced worksheets to test your progress or print for your students. These professional PDF worksheets can be easily accessed for only a few Academic Marks .

Our voice   academic reader (including all three chapters about this topic) can be accessed here at the click of a button.

Gain unlimited access to our voice   beginner worksheet, with activities and answer keys designed to check a basic understanding of this reader’s chapters.

To check a confident understanding of this reader’s chapters, click on the button below to download our voice   intermediate worksheet with activities and answer keys.

Our voice   advanced worksheet with activities and answer keys has been created to check a sophisticated understanding of this reader’s chapters. 

To save yourself 3 Marks , click on the button below to gain unlimited access to all of our voice   guidance and worksheets. The All-in-1 Pack includes every chapter on this topic, as well as our beginner, intermediate and advanced worksheets in one handy PDF.

Click on the button below to gain unlimited access to our voice  teacher’s PowerPoint, which should include everything you’d need to successfully introduce this topic.

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i am writing an essay change the voice

Professional Passive Voice Converter

What is a passive to active voice translator.

An online tool to detect passive voice sentences and suggest the desired corrections in a piece of writing automatically with the help of predefined software-based linguistic algorithms and grammatical rules is known as a passive voice converter. The use of a passive voice checker free online tool has become a professional trend in almost all domains of writing across the industries and business domains. Making your writings more attractive and professional is the main purpose of using an online passive and active verb generator. Those active voice changer tools offer numerous capabilities such as grammar, punctuation, plagiarism, and vocabulary checking, linguistic accuracy, and much more.  Using an active verb converter provides you with numerous features and capabilities that help you make your piece of text awesome and have a great user experience. The top 3 features of an online professional-level active/passive voice changing tool should include ease in use, instant results, great reliability.

i am writing an essay change the voice

Simple & Intuitive

The simple to use and intuitive interface make a professional active to passive converter more attractive for the users. The input text-field or widget for pasting the text to check and translate sentences to passive voice should be placed in a very prominent position on the homepage of the website. Using the features of the tool should be so simple and just one click away.

Instant & Accurate

A great tool to change active voice to passive voice online should have features of great accuracy in text correction and choosing the right vocabulary and verbs. Passive to active voice changer should be instant to act even while writing some text in the text-checking field of the tool. The processing time of a copied and pasted text should be very fast with instant response to the flaws in the text.

Available & Reliable

24×7 availability of an online tool is one of the most important features. The need for a fix passive voice tool to remain online is always present because the internet does not sleep at all. To earn the reputation of reliable and trustworthy service, online passive checker tools to change passive to active should be up and available for at least 99.99% of the total time of the year.

For Whom Active Voice Checker Is Useful?

The use of passive sentences is extensively found in governmental, legal, research, corporate, and other forms of communication. Owing to the importance of those domains, the correct use of passive voice is highly needed. Using a passive checker tool is one of the best ways to make your sentences more accurate, accurate, and professional. A wide range of professionals and people working in different domains of business, industries, and sectors can benefit from changing passive to active voice. Mainly, the following people can benefit the most from it: ✓ Professors, researchers, and educationists ✓ Lawyers, judges, and complainants ✓ Corporate managers and consultants ✓ HR managers, job seekers, and employers ✓ Fiction writer, linguists, culturalists, and historians ✓ Government employees, officers, and analysts 

How to Use Active Voice Detector?

Using different types of active voice converter is very simple and easy. The online tool add a very simple way to interact with the tool and get the job done. In most cases, using a passive voice detector online tool consists of 3 steps. Let’s talk about those steps individually.

Copy and Paste Text

The first step of using an active voice changer is the copy and paste your text to the field or a widget available on the page of voice detector tool. Normally, passive to active voice generator allows a direct copy and paste option as well as an upload option to choose the desired file to upload and check for passive voice mistakes.

Errors Detection

The second step is to initiate the process of the detection of errors in the text. Normally, this process is triggered through a click of the button or with a strike of the return button on the computer. The automated process of checking the errors starts. This process of checking errors is done in the background with the help of predefined grammatical rules and software algorithms based on those rules. The detected errors are underlined in different colors.

Corrective Suggestions

The corrective suggestion is offered by the tool automatically; you need to just click the underlined word or sentence. The available options for passive voice check, correct version of the passive voice, verb, spelling, punctuation, or any other grammar-related mistakes appear in a popup window. You can read and check those suggestions for a better selection of the options.

How to Define Active and Passive Voices?

Any sentence having a subject, which directly performs the action characterized by the verb of the sentence on the object of the sentence is known as an active voice sentence. In an active voice sentence, the sequence of the parts of speech will be subject, the verb in an active form, and object. An example of an active voice sentence is given below:

“I write an essay”

Any sentence in which the subject is not in the active form and the object takes the position of the subject while the subject is acted upon by the verb is called a passive voice sentence. In a passive voice sentence, the subject of an active voice sentence acts as an indirect object acted upon by the verb, and the object of the sentence takes the place of the direct subject. An example of a passive voice sentence is shown below:

“An essay is written by me”

In the above example, you saw the form of pronoun changed from the subjective pronoun “I” to the objective pronoun “me” . This means, the direct subject “I” is now being acted upon by the verb “write” in its third form “past participle” is used.

Why Find and Convert Passive to Active Voice?

In any formal writing, the use of passive voice sentences is very common, especially in legal, research, scientific, literature, history, government, and corporate communication. Proper use of the passive voice sentences would leave an awesome impression on the readers.

The main reasons of why to find and use a passive converter tool include:

✓ Passive to active voice converter online is very fast to use and instant to access online passive checker tool ✓ A very easy and simple way to use it for free of charge ✓ Offers corrective measures to improve your writing skills and grammatical understanding ✓ A professional tool helps improve your writing quality tremendously ✓ Passive voice to active voice online converter decreases the grammatical mistakes especially the improper use of voices in the sentences ✓ Detects all punctuation and spelling mistakes to make your piece of text great ✓ Discards the possibility of any plagiarism in the text ✓ Change the voice online converter offers very reliable and accurate correction results ✓ Active to passive voice converter online also offers great availability and customer support

Manual Passive Voice Changing vs Using Passive Voice Generator

Almost, all fields and domains of industry and businesses of our day-to-day lives are highly influenced by modern technologies like the internet, websites, and telecommunication. Without the use of modern technologies, it has become so difficult to catch the pace of the competitors in the marketplace. This notion is also 100% true as far as the grammar checking of the text is concerned. The comparison of manual and online passive voice checking is given below.

i am writing an essay change the voice

Using Online Passive Voice Checker

✓ Very fast and efficient ✓ No need for any linguistic expertise at all ✓ Reduced chances of skipping of passive voice mistake ✓ Available in both free and paid versions of subscriptions ✓ Helps you improve your mistakes ✓ Easy to detect plagiarism in the text ✓ Numerous additional services such as spelling, punctuation, and plagiarism offered ✓ Offers multiple options of words to enhance your vocabulary and correct use of words

i am writing an essay change the voice

Manual Passive Voice Checking

✓ Slow and time-consuming ✓ Need expertise in linguistics ✓ Chances of missing the passive voice mistakes ✓ You need a huge fee for manual checking by professionals ✓ The turnaround time of manual service is so long ✓ You learn less in professional passive voice checking service ✓ It is not available round the clock ✓ Not possible to detect plagiarism easily ✓ The use of additional services cost you additionally ✓ You do not enhance your vocabulary as effectively

What Are Extra Benefits of Free Grammar Checker for Passive Voice?

An online grammar checker offers numerous additional benefits, which you cannot achieve through manual services by any writing services. The main reason is that online services are powered by the confluence of modern technologies and knowledge of linguistic experts. Besides, an online voice checker service helps you improve your vocabulary by using the most suitable word in the text to make it the most professional one. The main advantages offered by the online free grammar checker for passive voice sentences include:

Styling and Formatting

An online passive voice checker service also offers the services of document styling and formatting capabilities, which make your document look great.

Tone and Effectiveness Check

Online services also check for the tone and effectiveness the text leaves on the readers.

i am writing an essay change the voice

Punctuation and Spelling

An online passive voice checker also checks for the spelling and punctuation mistakes in the text and corrects them in addition to the passive voice correction.

Plagiarism Check

Plagiarism checking is one of the salient additional capabilities of an online passive voice checkers to help avoid this criminal act.

Does Passive Voice to Active Voice Converter Tool Offer Great Results?

The latest study suggests that online active and passive voice converter tools play a very important role in the improvement of grammar accuracy of L2 writing in the students. A majority of the students showed trust in those online tools. It is very important to note that there is a constant need for improvement in the online tools for making the text more accurate and professional by finding out the vaguest mistakes and sentimental expressions of the content. Implementing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in the online grammar checker tools is continually improving the effectiveness and accuracy of those tools. The use of AI in online passive voice checker tools are helping understand the feedback and behavior of different types of writers and implementing them into the suggestion building algorithms. Thus, the level of trust for those tools is improving significantly. The accuracy rate has also improved in the modern online tools as compared to those used a few years back. The number of users is continuously increasing in all domains of industries and sectors of education, which is a clear indicator of the great results offered by those online passive voice converter tools in the marketplace.

i am writing an essay change the voice

As a writer who is constantly engaged in writing, chances are you’ve noticed some parts of your writing tend to shine, while others don’t. To iron out these dull sentences, you need to consider active and passive sentence construction, its contextual use, and how you can convert passive voice to active voice. But before that, let’s briefly take a look at how passive and active voices can transform your writing.

How to Transform Your Writing Style Using Active Voice

Adds clarity to your writing.

Using active voice results in shorter, sharper, and more concise sentences. This makes it easier for the readers to easily follow what you are trying to communicate, as well as visualize what’s happening.

For example:

Mary’s classmates cheered as she won the race.

Create vivid images in fiction writing

As a fiction writer, you can also use active voice to create vivid images and advance the plot. Students, on the other hand, can also use active voice to discuss complex academic subjects in their essays or to persuade readers to embrace their arguments.

The test results prove that the drug kills cancer cells.

Eliminates redundancy in your writing

When writing overly long sentences with detailed explanations, strictly using active voice can make your texts sound robotic and redundant. As such, using active to passive converter software to inject a healthy mix of both active and passive voice can help maintain concision and clarity.

How to Identify Active Voice in Your Writing

The easiest way to identify whether your sentence is in the active voice is to establish the location of the subject (actor) and the verb (action). When the subject precedes the verb in a sentence, you most likely have an active voice.

Alternatively, you can use an online passive to active generator like ours. The tool crawls through your texts identifying active voice-related mistakes, as well as allowing you to convert active voice to passive voice and vice versa.

Passive Voice

How to transform your writing style using passive to active converter, active voice vs. passive voice: differences and similarities.

Just like any other English writing building elements and blocks, both the passive and active voices have distinct roles, similarities, and differences. Let’s take a look at some of them.

If you want to make your writings professional and mistake-free, use our passive to active voice converter to polish your writing skills!

i am writing an essay change the voice

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What is a Writer’s Voice & How to Find and Develop Your Writing Voice

i am writing an essay change the voice

by Fija Callaghan

Think about who your favorite authors are. Now, ask yourself why they’re your favorites. Is it because of the clever plot twists and turns of phrase ? Is it because of the way they craft compelling, believable characters ? All of these things are part of making a great story, but if you love returning to the same author again and again it’s probably due to something much simpler—their voice . The way they tell the story.

What is voice in writing?

A writer’s voice, also called a literary voice, is a blend of the writer’s personal style, tone, personality, vocabulary, syntax, and unique experiences. In simpler terms, it’s the personal expression of that writer and no one else. Many writers can be identified by the unique way their voices sound on the page, even when the narrators and genres change.

Regardless of the story’s genre or time period, certain stylistic trademarks will consistently make their way into any given writer’s work. These can include the way sentences are structured: some writers might favor short, snappy sentences while others like indulgent sentences held aloft by a small army of commas that go on for a third of the page. The energy to those sentences might be intimate, lighthearted, and approachable, or they might be more objective and distant. This all becomes part of a writer’s signature style.

Voice in writing is the unique tone, personality, word choice, and poetic structure a writer uses to express themselves on the page.

You’ll also see the same thematic elements in a writer’s work, even when the plots and characters change. This is because deep down, writers are often trying to communicate the same central ideas to their audiences over and over, since they’re things the authors care about deeply. This passion will naturally become a part of the stories that they tell.

A writer’s voice can also be a reflection of the relationship they have with the reader and with the world around them.

Some writers might find ironic humor in every moment of their story. Some might converse with the reader with a comfortable intimacy, like a sibling or friend. Others might be drawn to the beauty all around them, exploring it with rich, sensual imagery in any genre of work.

You’ll be instinctively drawn to these energies in the work of the writers you love. When you begin writing your own stories and developing your own unique voice, you’ll find that your own energy and tone begins to shine through more and more.

The writer’s voice vs. character’s voice

It’s important to note that the writer’s voice isn’t the same thing as their characters’ voices. A writer’s voice is the expression of the author; a character’s voice is the unique way in which their fictional characters express themselves.

In a well-written story, two characters might speak in very different ways depending on their social class, location, and upbringing. Giving your characters different voices is a wonderful exercise in characterization.

For example, if you write a story about a troubled city-bred teenager going to visit his ailing grandmother in the countryside, it’s unlikely that the teenager and the grandmother would speak in the same style. They’d probably have different vocabularies, different ways of putting their sentences together, and they’d speak at different paces.

Showing these two character voices realistically is not an easy thing to do, but a wonderful way to grow as a writer.

The writer’s voice vs. point of view

In creative writing, authors also need to choose a point of view from which to express the story.

The most common point of view styles are first person (told from the character’s perspective, using the pronoun “I”), third person limited, and third person omniscient (both told through the narrator’s voice, using the pronouns “He,” “She,” and “They”). However, there are other point of view styles you can use like second person and fourth person.

Some of these perspectives will be closer to the characters, and others will be more distant. In a closer, more intimate perspective, you may find that the author’s voice and the character’s voice overlap. In a more removed point of view, you may find that the story being told begins to sound less like your individual characters and more like you.

5 distinctive writer’s voices

Some writers in literature have such instantly recognizable voices that you would never mistake them for anyone else; they’ve inspired generations of imitators, as well as new authors who have learned from them before going on to develop unique voices of their own.

Let’s look at some of the most iconic writer’s voices in literature.

1. Mark Twain

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with.

Mark Twain was the original American everyman. Unlike many of his contemporaries who were writing in high literary voices, he wrote stories using a first-person narrator drenched in the slang and colloquialisms of the time. This made it feel like you were hearing an account from a close friend instead of reading a highbrow literary work.

The quote above is from his magnum opus, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , a book that was incredibly ahead of its time and is still being debated today. His casual intimacy made his stories feel marvelously present and immersive for readers.

2. Raymond Chandler

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Raymond Chandler has been called “the father of the noir genre,” and is famous for his gritty, lightly sardonic detective novels of the 1930s and 1940s. His narration is made up of short, snappy clauses, one- and two-syllable word choice, and lines of dialogue that keep the pace swift. His writing voice has a marvelous gift for conveying time and place.

The quote shown here is the opening to his first major novel, The Big Sleep , which later became a cult favorite film starring Humphrey Bogart. Right away he shows us a self-aware depreciation that endears us to the central character and lands us squarely in the sharp, well-developed lines of the setting.

3. Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

So begins one of the most iconic romantic comedies of all time. Jane Austen wrote with a soft, romantic neoclassicism, hiding a sarcastic and rich perception of the human condition behind the socially acceptable formality of the time.

Her author’s voice contains sentences are often long and languid and sepia-toned. If you read her work and pay attention, however, you’ll notice a cutting wit weaving in and out of the rose-scented decorum.

A powerful author’s voice can stay with readers for generations.

4. Ernest Hemingway

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

Ernest Hemingway is famous for prose that is clean and uncluttered to the point of sparsity; luxuries like adjectives, adverbs, and semicolons are used sparingly or tossed away in favour of stark minimalism.

The above excerpt is from his Parisian memoir, A Moveable Feast . In his work, Hemingway stripped away everything that was unnecessary to reveal the carefully curated bones of the story underneath. In character-driven works, the dialogue is largely objective; he does not romanticize his narrative, but simply shows the world the way it is. Nothing more and nothing less.

5. Agatha Christie

“Supposing,” murmured Poirot, “that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?” “Well,” I said. “I can’t see any excitement in that!” Poirot threw me a glance of reproof. “No, because there are no curiously twisted daggers, no blackmail, no emerald that is the stolen eye of a god, no untraceable Eastern poisons. You have the melodramatic soul, Hastings.”

Agatha Christie’s writing has a simplistic poetry to it that is anything but simple. The long reigning queen of crime fiction, her work is heavy with expository dialogue and is rich in characterization. Though her work deals with unnerving and often bloody subject matter, the way she strings her words together has a soft and quintessentially feminine energy.

This quote from her famous ABC Murders shows the way she plays with character psychology through dialogue. She is very efficient at conveying layers of subtext through careful word selection and simple dialogue.

3 ways to develop your own writing voice

Now that you’ve developed an understanding of what voice in writing means, let’s explore three things you can do to begin developing your author’s voice (and one thing not to do!).

1. Read everything

This is true of all aspects of the writing craft, but especially for developing your literary voice.

Try reading the five authors we talked about here, and go back and read your personal favorites. Read new authors just launching their debut novels, and seasoned authors whose books have been inspiring writers for generations. Read books in the genre you hope to write in, and books it would have never occurred to you to read before. Every single one has something to teach you.

The best way to develop your own writer’s voice? Read voraciously.

Try to develop an inner ear for the way each writer assembles a single sentence. Look at which details they take time to explore and which details they leave to the imagination of the reader. By getting to know the rhythms of a range of different writers, you’ll begin to get a sense of which ones feel like they could be a part of you.

2. Try on other writers

Once you’ve absorbed the voices of other writers through reading, try giving yourself a challenge: write something in the voice of one or more of those writers.

For instance, you might write a piece of flash fiction and imagine how it would sound if Ernest Hemingway had written it, and then describe the same story again in the voice of Jane Austen. You’ll be amazed at how different they’ll be.

This is not plagiarism, because you’re being inspired by these author’s voices—you’re not copying their writing word for word. If it makes you more comfortable, you can subtitle your story, “inspired by the literary voice of ______.” However, the most important thing is that you begin with your own unique ideas and challenge yourself to fit those ideas into voices that have inspired you.

Here’s the thing: your subconscious is pretty smart. Without you even noticing, your mind will be cataloguing all of these details and deciding which ones feel like a good fit for your unique voice, and discarding the rest. Doing these exercises won’t leave you sounding like a watered down version of Jane Austen or Ernest Hemingway; they’ll help you find which tones, styles, and rhythms feel like “home” to you and which are only places to visit. The voice you emerge with will be all your own.

3. Experiment with structure

It’s been said that formal, structured poetry reveals a lot more about a writer than modern free verse poetry. The reason for this is that when faced with more rigid boundaries, writers will naturally look for ways to stretch their personal creativity and express their own voice.

For example, if two poets are told to write a fourteen-line sonnet in iambic pentameter about the rain on a winter’s day, those two writers will produce two very, very different poems. Each one will reveal something about the way that writer sees the world and their relationship with it.

The same is true of fiction. Say two writers are asked to write a short story about two people who meet at a busy café in a train station, each of whom is keeping a secret from the other. Sounds pretty specific, doesn’t it? And yet, this simple story seed holds worlds of possibility.

The way each writer brings their own unique perspectives, tone, approach to sentence structure, and perception of the human condition will dictate the direction that this little story will take.

To grow your skills as a writer, try experimenting with structure, writing prompts, and personal challenges.

To develop your own writer’s voice, try using writing prompts and story archetypes to exercise your writing muscles. The more specific the exercises, the more you’ll be able to see how much of what comes out is completely, unapologetically you .

Bonus: the 1 thing not to do to develop your writer’s voice

In some lessons on developing your writer’s voice, you might come across this singularly important “rule” (like all “rules” of writing, be wary of following it if you don’t quite understand why you’re following it in the first place): whatever you do, keep it consistent .

The reasons for this are twofold: Firstly, if you need to force yourself to keep your writer’s voice consistent, it’s not your writer’s voice. Your voice is what naturally comes from you; it is your essence given from in words. If you ever feel like your writer’s voice is getting off track and you need to corral it back into shape, what you have is not a voice—it’s a style.

The second reason is that your writer’s voice is constantly evolving. Growth is never a bad thing in any aspect of our lives, and certainly not in our literary voices. The more we read, write, and learn about the world, the more our writing will evolve and refine. Trying to keep it “consistent” is to limit all the possibilities of what it can become.

The bottom line? Finding your writer’s voice is not an act of creating something from nothing; it is an act of sloughing away everything your voice is not to reveal the voice that has been there all along, and then giving it room to grow.

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So, You Love Sending Voice Notes. Do Your Friends Love Getting Them?

The audio messages give users the freedom to deliver lengthy, meandering monologues — to the chagrin of some recipients.

i am writing an essay change the voice

By Carly Lewis

It has become a common scene. Your phone dings, but instead of a text, it’s a forewarning that someone has orated just for you a private podcast of any imaginable length, the subject unknown until you press play. It could be a juicy morsel of gossip, a yarn replete with twists and turns, or a totally mundane account from someone who simply didn’t have their hands free to type it out.

It’s a voice note — somehow one of the most divisive forms of modern communication.

More intimate than a text and less urgent than a call, the audio messages don’t set a maximum time limit, unlike other voice messaging services, which eventually cut the sender off. That means senders can hit record and embark on an uninhibited verbal journey, leaving recipients at their mercy.

“If I have to listen to one longer than a minute, I get distracted and stop taking it in,” said Iris Meines, a 29-year-old policy officer at the Dutch consulate in New York. “If it’s under a minute, I’m like, OK, I can do this. Six or seven is just terrible. I don’t even know if I could listen to seven minutes straight of a friend talking on the phone.”

She said she usually takes notes as the recording plays, so she doesn’t forget what points to respond to. (Apple added a transcription feature for audio messages with an update to its operating system in the fall.)

“My friends know I don’t like them,” Ms. Meines said. “I ask them, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’” She finds it particularly grating if she can hear people chewing as they record.

For Ms. Meines, voice notes are mildly irksome — she would prefer talking on the phone or texting if she can’t see her friends face to face, she said. But for others, they appear to border on, if not a moral problem, then at least a question of etiquette. Writing in The Atlantic , Jacob Sweet recently argued that audio messages were “indulgent” and could “encourage selfishness.” A headline in The Spectator described their ubiquity as a “tyranny.”

Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert who teaches classes for adults as well as children, said that voice notes should not be used for lengthy monologues, but only in cases in which “tone is necessary, but a conversation is not” — an apology, for instance.

“Exercise self-control,” she said. “Don’t barge into someone’s life with a long-winded voice note.” More detailed messages, Ms. Swann said, should be saved for a phone call, when both parties can actively engage.

For the phone-averse, that may be easier said than done. Whereas millennials became known for shying away from leaving voice mail messages , Gen Z has a reputation for avoiding phone calls altogether. In a study conducted last May , Australian researchers found that 87 percent of respondents ages 18 to 26 preferred to handle unpleasant dialogues by text instead of phone, and 49 percent said phone calls made them anxious. This may help explain why voice notes — which were introduced by Apple a decade ago but have surged in popularity only in recent years — appear to be especially popular with Gen Z-ers .

Though older generations can be distressed by the phone, too. Alana Jordan, 36, an actress and on-air host in Los Angeles, said she saw voice notes as a way to manage those nerves. She listens back to messages before she sends them and rerecords if she wants to adjust her tone. “Having the ability to edit yourself alleviates the anxiety of being misunderstood,” she said.

Some experts say there can be downsides to avoiding those discomforts. Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at M.I.T., warned of a widespread “flight from vulnerability.”

Voice note users, she said, “don’t have to respond to the friction of someone else’s affect” if a disagreement comes up, for example, or an unexpected question.

“Voice notes are essentially no risk,” said Professor Turkle, who is also the author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.” “People are losing the capacity for empathetic conversations, which is how we connect with each other. We need to practice that. People are so worried about showing too much of themselves.”

But rather than finding voice notes impersonal or closed off, many of their proponents — often just as vociferous as their critics — say they allow for a special kind of intimacy and vulnerability.

Brittany Marshall, a 27-year-old student who moved to New Jersey from Louisiana to study African American literature, said that she wasn’t the biggest fan of voice notes. “I have to stop what I’m doing and listen to them,” she said. “Then I have to remember everything so I can address it in my response.”

But she welcomes them from one close friend back home. The familiar voice is comforting, she said, and her friend’s expressive speaking style — thanks to a theater performance background — makes her laugh.

Gemalene Sunga, an immunology student in Houston, said she didn’t like being bombarded with a string of voice notes — her friends will send “six or seven in a row, all two minutes long, at least,” she said. “But I do like being able to hear my friends’ voices.”

Ms. Sunga, 31, added that, taking a longer view, she also appreciates voice notes as digital keepsakes. While Apple’s operating system defaults to deleting the messages after two minutes, recipients have the option to save them forever.

“Not to be morbid, but I’m such a nostalgic person that I do think about these things,” she said. “Voice notes aren’t tangible, but they’re sentimental to me.”

So much so that, despite their potential to become irritating, Ms. Sunga is trying to get her friends to send her voice notes even more frequently by sending them herself. “I only safely do it with specific friends, and I read the room,” she said. “I want to be considerate.”

As with any newer form of communication technology, it could take everyone a while to get on the same page about the proper courtesies. “With voice notes, there isn’t yet an established norm, so people have different interpretations,” said Melanie Green, chair of the communication department at the University at Buffalo.

There is research to support that words spoken aloud are better remembered than words read in silence, and that talking to oneself can be therapeutic . In 2007, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles found that affect labeling — the process of putting feelings into words — can help people manage their responses to negative feelings over time.

Rambling voice notes, then, while potentially onerous on the receiver, may be a healthy practice for the sender.

“I dislike them when I have to listen to them,” Ms. Meines said. “But I love sending them.”

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COMMENTS

  1. Changing Passive to Active Voice

    Make what is acted upon the subject of the sentence, and change the verb to a form of be + past participle. Including an explicit by the... phrase is optional. This passive voice contains a by the... phrase. Removing the by the... phrase and reworking the sentence will give it the active voice.

  2. Passive Voice Checker

    The passive voice isn't wrong, but it's not always appropriate.It's pretty common to use the passive voice in scientific writing or in situations where you don't know who performed a certain action, as in "My bike was stolen."But in most other cases, sticking to the active voice is more direct and produces more concise writing.

  3. Passive Voice: What Passive Voice Is and When to Use It

    Grammarly Updated on April 25, 2023 Grammar The passive voice is often maligned by teachers and professors as a bad writing habit. Or, to put that in the active voice: Teachers and professors across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit. What is the passive voice?

  4. Active Voice vs Passive Voice in Essay Writing: What's the Difference?

    1. Usage For most of the writing that you do, be it blogs, emails, different types of academic essays, and more, an active voice is ideal to use for communicating and expressing your thoughts, facts, and ideas more clearly and efficiently. This way, your essay papers or other academic assessments stand out amongst the rest.

  5. Passive Voice: When to Use It and When to Avoid It

    In a passive sentence, the person or thing acted on comes first, and the actor is added at the end, introduced with the preposition "by.". The passive form of the verb is signaled by a form of "to be": in the sentence above, "was formulated" is in passive voice while "formulated" is in active. In a passive sentence, we often ...

  6. Passive Voice

    Myths So what is the passive voice? First, let's be clear on what the passive voice isn't. Below, we'll list some common myths about the passive voice: 1. Myth: Use of the passive voice constitutes a grammatical error. Use of the passive voice is not a grammatical error.

  7. More about Passive Voice

    Also, overuse of passive voice throughout an essay can cause your prose to seem flat and uninteresting. In scientific writing, however, passive voice is more readily accepted since using it allows one to write without using personal pronouns or the names of particular researchers as the subjects of sentences (see the third example above).

  8. Your Writing "Voice"

    Tone. Tone is the communicator's attitude toward the subject and audience as expressed in a text. For example, are you trying to convey anger, joy, sarcasm, contempt, anxiety, or respect? To gain control of your tone, read drafts aloud and listen to the attitudes you convey. Is the tone consistent throughout the text? Should it be?

  9. Making Sure Your Voice is Present

    "Voice" is a weird term, right? We usually say your voice is the quality of how you sound when you talk out loud—but aren't we talking about writing? First, let's think about everything that makes your speaking voice distinctive.

  10. Using the Active Voice to Strengthen Your Writing

    Writing in the active voice means constructing sentences where the subject "acts": I threw the ball.; You are making too much noise.; Ben will eat popcorn and watch a movie tomorrow evening.; In each of these sentences, the subject (I, You and Ben respectively) performs the action of the verb (threw, making, will watch).

  11. Your voice

    A critical aspect of higher education is the development of knowledge through debate and discourse. Good academic writing uses a mixture of the voices. In practical terms, this includes a blend of your voice and the voice of others. Whenever you are using the work of someone else, this must be appropriately cited and referenced.

  12. How To Avoid Using "We," "You," And "I" in an Essay

    Maintaining a formal voice while writing academic essays and papers is essential to sound objective. One of the main rules of academic or formal writing is to avoid first-person pronouns like "we," "you," and "I.". These words pull focus away from the topic and shift it to the speaker - the opposite of your goal.

  13. The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay

    The essay writing process consists of three main stages: Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline. Writing: Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion. Revision: Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling ...

  14. Mastering Tone of Voice: How Successful Writers Engage Audiences

    Tone of voice is the attitude your writing conveys to others — be it respectful, serious, playful, or dramatic. It gives your writing "flavor" by showing nuanced emotions. We express how we feel in person in many ways — facial expressions, body language, word choice, etc — and our tone changes with context.

  15. Voice in Writing

    1) The use of simple and informal word choices and sentence structure. 2) The repetition of words or forms of words. 3) Engaging personally with the topic. What is the purpose of voice in...

  16. How can I effectively balance 'voice' in my writing?

    1. Balancing Voice. A well-written academic essay tends to have a good balance of writer voice, mixed voice and source voice in each paragraph. Generally speaking, the writer's voice usually accounts for about 40% of each body paragraph, with the remaining 60% being used to introduce evidence and support through mixed and source voice.

  17. Online Passive Voice Converter

    An online tool to detect passive voice sentences and suggest the desired corrections in a piece of writing automatically with the help of predefined software-based linguistic algorithms and grammatical rules is known as a passive voice converter.

  18. writing

    On the other hand, if some sentences seem to require the passive voice, by all means those sentences should be written in the passive voice. But the passive voice should only be used where it is justified, that is, where its use improves readability of the thesis. 1 See how much better your sentences would read here.

  19. 7 Ways to Amp up Your Writer's Voice in a College Essay

    7 Ways to Amp up Your Writer's Voice in a College Essay What do you sound like when you talk? What's your tone, pace, volume? What's your speaking style? Style is one of those vague words we'll explore here to identify exactly what does voice mean in a college essay. What is voice in writing?

  20. The change of voice from active to passive and vice-versa

    In an active voice, the subject in the sentence does the action. The tone of these sentences is perfect and precise. The change of voice will then take place from active to passive. These are direct sentences. Let us consider an example - The police chased the robbers. In this sentence, police are the subject, chased is the verb, and robbers ...

  21. What is a Writer's Voice & Tips for Finding Your Writing Voice

    A writer's voice, also called a literary voice, is a blend of the writer's personal style, tone, personality, vocabulary, syntax, and unique experiences. In simpler terms, it's the personal expression of that writer and no one else. Many writers can be identified by the unique way their voices sound on the page, even when the narrators ...

  22. C. Change the voice: 1. I was writing an essay.2. She looks after the

    1. The essay was being written by me.... 2. The child was looked after by her..... 3. The entire block would be demolished by them.... Hope you may got it. Please mark it as brainliest plzzzz and like it also. Please follow me don't forget it if you want to have good and unspamed answers. Thank you

  23. I was writing an essay. change into passive voice

    The sentence can be changed into passive voice as: An essay was being written by me.. What are active voice and passive voice sentences? An active voice sentence can be described as a type of sentence in which the subject performs an action.The verb is the recipient of the action of the subject.; On the other hand, a passive voice sentence can be described as a type of sentence in which the ...

  24. Voice Note Etiquette: How Long Is Too Long?

    "Voice notes aren't tangible, but they're sentimental to me." So much so that, despite their potential to become irritating, Ms. Sunga is trying to get her friends to send her voice notes ...