Week 4- Keela Disterhaft

I always struggle with passive and active voice. I’ve always been shown examples of active versus passive verbs but I never quite understood it. The way that the book describes it helped me out a little. The most useful sentence that I read is:

“In the passive voice, the person or thing performing the action becomes instead the object of the sentence; it does not act, but is acted upon by the verb.”

This statement helped clarify what exactly is passive voice. I always had a hard time pinpointing a sentence or a phrase as passive or active. The only thing I knew for sure was that active voice sounds better and is less cluttered with words.

Another example pf passive voice that completely goes against what I though earlier was, “Mistakes were made.”

Prior to reading this chapter I would’ve thought that this sentence was active because it’s short and to the point. The book points out that there is no identity of who made the mistakes. If you add a person to the sentence,

“Mistakes were made by him.”

This sentence sounds awkward and needs to be “cleaned up.” I would change this to, “He made a mistake.”

The mistake I saw this week was from an article written by Buzzfeed. I really love this company but I know they have a bad reputation amongst a lot of the people I talk to who are writers. The headline read: New Born Babies in Venezuela Are Sleeping in Cardboard Boxes. They misspelled newborn.