26 Active Voice
By Steve Narisi
When writing, journalists use the active voice.
Journalists(subject) use(verb) active voice(direct object).
There is a time and place for passive voice, but journalists should rarely use it.
Why use active voice?
The active voice is concise, clear, descriptive, and easy to understand. It is more action-focused in driving the narrative forward. It tightens text by focusing attention on the subject and the action.
In active voice, the subject does something, while in the passive voice, something is being done to the subject.
In a previous chapter, you studied common sentence patterns. The most common pattern for active voice is Subject-Verb-Direct Object. For example, look at this sentence:
The teenager drove the car to school.
The teenager (subject) drove (verb) the car (direct object) to school.
Is there any doubt about who was driving the car or what was happening? In this example, active voice can highlight the action from the subject (doer) to the direct object (receiver): the teenager drove the car.
Let’s look at another example:
The quarterback threw the football to the tight end.
The quarterback (subject) threw (verb) the football (direct object) to the tight end.
Here’s another:
The police arrested the suspect at his home.
The police (subject) arrested (verb) the suspect (direct object) at his home.
For a comparison, let’s change the first sentence to the passive voice.
The car was driven to the school by the teenager.
What do you notice? Is the action harder to follow and the sentence a bit wordier?
Breaking down the sentence structure, the direct object becomes the subject, the subject becomes the direct object and the verb needs a helping verb, was. Helping verbs are often a sign that a sentence is passive. To help determine whether a sentence is passive, look for variations of the verb be, such as am, is, was, were, are and been.
Other telltale signs of a passive sentence are the words “by” and “to.” Here are the other two examples in passive voice.
The football was caught by the tight end.
The man was arrested by police at his home.
You should now be ready to practice converting problematic sentences from passive to active voice. The following flip-card set gives you six sentences in passive voice. Consider how you would rewrite each sentence and then turn each card for a suggested revision.
Passive Voice Exceptions
For a quick review, let’s start with two sentences in active voice:
- In journalistic writing, journalists prefer active voice.
- They use passive voice in certain situations, though.
Now, here are the same two sentences in passive voice:
- In journalistic writing, the active voice is preferred.
- The passive voice is used in certain situations, though.
The passive voice can occasionally be helpful when the writer wants to emphasize the action or object rather than who performed the action. This is especially true in broadcast news writing:
An unidentified body was found in the woods just before dawn today.
The passive voice is also used when continuing a thought or creating a flow:
The school board voted last night to expand Dunbar Elementary School. The expansion was supposed to happen last year but was delayed because of a tax shortfall.
Again, there are exceptions to the rule, but media writers should use active voice in most sentences.
The following poetic form provides a helpful review:
The reporter writing the story
The editor reviewing the copy
Should stress the active voice.
If they don’t,
The story is being written
The copy is being reviewed
Incorrectly.
