Use the passive voice when you don’t know who is doing an action, or to emphasise that an action is being done to something or someone, rather than focusing on who or what is doing the action. For ...

Even when you think you’ve got a handle on grammar, you might not realize how easy it is easy to unwittingly venture into lexical territory that would rile your freshman year English teacher.

Both sentence pairs make sense. Both describe the same facts. However, in each pair one sentence uses the active voice and one uses the passive voice. Which sentence would you use? That would depend ...

The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing, blamed ...

Does the passive voice lend itself to biased, manipulative writing? A reader named Richard wanted to know after witnessing a discussion about a news article. “Someone criticized an article on politics ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing. In his new ...