Now she is teaching me a lesson: that the passive can be vivid – to the boundary of yuck, as in “peeled” and “sawed off.” That’s when it hit me like a pool cue to the solar plexus.

To the Editor: William Germano finds it ironic that academics warn their students off the passive voice while peppering their own writing with that construction (“Passive Is Spoken Here,” The ...

Passive voice is useful to pull the emphasis of the sentence away from the researcher. It is especially applicable to the “Method” section of scientific journals.

Passive voice means that the object of a transitive verb is made the grammatical subject of the clause. To see what that means, let’s start with an active-voice sentence: Katie wrecked the car.

In passive voice, helping verbs are necessary to indicate the passive construction. These are forms of the verb "to be" (is, are, was, were, being, been).

Passive voice is a fantastic tool for sneaks and manipulators to slither around the truth. More often, though, it allows bad writers to write badly. And just as often, ...

The passive voice comes into play to soften the message or idea a business writer is trying to convey. Examples of this are evident in documents such as credit denial letters.

Passive voice is often awkward and hard to understand. Now let’s look at a quick example of both: Humans are destroying the rain forest. The rain forest is being destroyed by humans.