Blog 4: Topical Guide

The Topical Guide is full of many things to learn. You can spend hours studying the different topics within it. A lot of the topics I found were common mistakes we each make when writing, I know I do. Since I write for The Signpost, I think that what stood out to me the most is active and passive voice. Headlines and articles are written in active voice. That definitely is something that I have trouble with and continue working on.

In an early spirit of Halloween one thing that has helped me to remember passive and active voice are zombies. Basically if the sentence makes sense when you add "by zombies" after the verb then the sentence is probably in passive voice. Now, it is important to note that this isn't an official rule and doesn't apply in every case, this is just a helpful clue, I guess.

Suppose we have a sentence that says "The town was attacked" if we were to add "by zombies" we'll be able to tell if it is actually passive voice. The complete sentence would then be "the town was attacked by zombies" since this makes sense it is a passive sentence. If we were to change the order of the original sentence to say "Zombies attacked the town"then we attempt adding our new ending it would read "Zombies attacked the town by zombies," since this does not make sense we know it is in active voice.