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Step 1
Identify a passive voice sentence. You can identify passive voice construction from the trigger words, "be, is, was, were, by," and so forth. For example, "The Grand Canyon was visited by tourists."
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Step 2
Identify the noun in the sentence.
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Step 3
Move the noun in the sentence to the front of the sentence.
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Step 4
Place the action verb immediately after the noun.
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Step 5
Remove past tense references, and passive voice trigger words such as "be, by, were, was, is..."
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Step 6
Rewrite the remainder of the sentence. For example, "Tourists visit the Grand Canyon."
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Step 7
Review two more examples. The breakfast was eaten by my daughter. (Passive Voice Construction). My daughter ate breakfast (Active Voice Construction). Ten pounds were lost by me (Passive Voice Construction). I lost 10 pounds (Active Voice Construction).
Comments
xlittlep said
on 7/9/2009 Those are the worst examples I've ever heard. No one says, "breakfast was eaten by my daughter", or "ten pounds were lost by me". It just seems like you took an active voice sentence and turned it passive for the sake of example.
Here is an example from an actual technical document I am working on right now: "The effects of the new method will need to be measured carefully before moving forward". The steps are helpful. The noun is effects, and the verb is measure, but who or what is measuring them? In this case, I am, so I will change my sentence to: "I must carefully measure the effects of the new method before I can forward."
Although this is another example using "by", usually the "by" phrase is implied or assumed, which makes the passive voice fix non-intuitive. By stating the assumption, you can solve two uses of bad writing in one fix.
JakeG said
on 1/12/2009 Explained very easy to understand. Step by step was great. Thanks so much! Jessica
(Better than my English teacher explained. lol)