How to Make a Passive Sentence Active

Many English teachers cringe when their students write their sentences in the passive tense. As a student it can be difficult to reconstruct your passive sentences especially when they sound as if they make sense. This ehow article will give you quick rules to making your grammar life a breeze.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Read over your sentences and ask yourself “who is doing the action”. In active voice the noun should be doing the action. In passive voice your subject is the direct object.

2. Take the following sentence "The race was run by Jan". In this sentence race is the noun and unfortunately the race cannot run. Therefore in order to reconstruct the sentence move the subject of the sentence “Jan” into a place where Jan is the one running.

3. When moving our subject to the front of the sentence it now reads “Jan ran the race”
   This is the correct active voice because Jan is now running the race.

4. This easy and quick fix will make your writing much cleaner and clearer.

[MyJB]

on 9/28/2009 This helps clear up a lot about active and passive voice. Thanks. 5*