One of the most uttered admonitions by English teachers, renowned professional writers, and newspaper editors is: use the active voice in your writing over the passive voice. It’s another way of saying that the subjects performing an action should always come first before the action. Simple as it sounds, it is not always easy especially if your knowledge of basic sentence structure and passive voice use is limited.
If you’ve been having challenges in changing passive verbs to active verbs or asking yourself something in the line of, ‘how do I change my sentence to active voice,’ you have come to the right place. This article will guide on what is active sentence construction, how to change passive verbs to active verbs, and when it’s appropriate to use passive verbs over active verbs. And while at it, we’re also going to reveal how an online passive or active voice checker can help.
What Makes an Active Sentence?
Active sentence construction in writing occurs when the subject in a sentence is performing a certain action. This action, which is represented by a verb forms a large part of speech to complete the sentence/s. Indeed, going back to the basic English grammar rules, a complete sentence must have a subject and a verb, both of which should agree with each other to create and express a complete idea. As such, when a verb in a sentence is enacted by its subject, that’s when we say that there’s active sentence construction.
Good examples of active sentences include:
Example #1: Jane ate six slices of bread at dinner. Instead of: At dinner, six slices of bread were eaten by Jane.
Example #2: Beautiful zebras roam the riverbanks. Instead of: The riverbanks are roamed by beautiful zebras.
Scenarios That Don’t Require You to Use an Active Voice Checker
As a student or professional writer, the use of an active voice is always encouraged, even though passive may be technically applicable. With that said, however, two of the most common circumstances where you should always use passive voice include:
- In the topic and opening sentence paragraphs. Example: Iceland contains a lot of interesting historical records. First, it reveals…
- When you want the reader to focus on the actor, not his actions. Example: Major Miley pursues the terrorist relentlessly.
- When you want the reader to know exactly who said or (or did) what to whom. Example: When the U.S. troops invaded Libya, they unintentionally killed many civilians.
- When you’re referring to another author’s work. Example: Newtown explains in the Law of Gravity how every particle attracts every other with a directly proportional force to their mass.
- When introducing a table or a figure. Example: Figure 2 illustrates how transcription is regulated in the different tissues.
Now that we have seen how you should use active voice, let’s take a look at how to make a sentence active.
How to Identify and Fix Active Sentences in Your Writing
Active voice is important in creating eloquent and dynamic essays, dissertations, and online content. As such, there are specific things that you need to do to identify whether you have correctly used it in your writing or not.
- Check whether the subject is performing the action. One of the quickest and easiest ways to identify an active sentence in your writing is to check whether the subject in the sentence is performing the action or not. If they’re then your sentence is in active voice. If they’re receiving the action, however, your sentence is in passive voice. To change this, you can rethink the sentence structure to create a distinction between the subject and the action that they’re performing.
- Watch out for helping verbs. More than often, passive sentence construction contains helping verbs like is, am, are, was, were, and, being, etc. And while you may not always have to change them, chances are they’re creating a passive voice in a sentence. Sometimes, you can simply eliminate these helping verbs to turn a passive sentence into an active one.
- Read your work aloud to check readability. Generally, sentences written in active voice are easier to read. As such, if you are reading your work aloud and it comes out awkward, chances are it is using passive voice. The only problem with this method is that it can be time-consuming. And even if you’re a fast reader, some sneaky mistakes may escape your eye.
And that’s where our passive to active voice editor comes in. On top of helping you identify the sentence using active voice correctly or otherwise, our tool helps you catch a wide range of other mistakes.
Benefits of Using Active Voice Checker
Although there are many reasons why you should consider using our active voice tester. But in the interest of time, we’re going to look at the top six.
- Saves time. Compared to proofreading and revising your work manually, our active voice sentence checker is able to deliver instant results.
- 100% free. Hiring a professional editor doesn’t come cheap, and neither does the huge number of paid-for tools doesn’t make things better. With our active voice translator, you can proofread and revise your work as many times as you wish without having to worry about spending a dime.
- Easy-to-use interface. Using our online active to passive voice converter app is as simple as it gets. Simply copy and paste your work and you’ll have ready work in seconds.
- Safe and secure. Our passive voice misuse checker doesn’t save your work on the local servers, and you can rest easy knowing that your work will not be shared with third parties.
- Available 24/7. Passive voice checker is cloud-hosted, making it available anytime and from anywhere.
- Versatile. Our tool is powered by the latest AI, NLP technology, and English grammar rules to help you construct sentences in the most optimal way, including the proper passive voice and comma use. Along with that, it also offers stylistic, spelling, grammar, sentence rewriting suggestions, and plagiarism checks, making it ideal for all kinds of writing.
Using Our Active Voice Sentence Generator: Step By Step Guide
You can use our active verb converter by following these easy steps:
- Start by visiting our website.
- Next, copy your text from Word Document, Google Doc, or any other source and paste it on the blank field editor. If you wish, you can also type directly on the blank field editor.
- Click the ‘Check’ button and wait for the active voice detector to check for passive voice misuse and other common mistakes. Once done, it will offer the most appropriate suggestions.
- Accept the suggestions as deemed appropriate and download your work.
Students and professional writers alike tend to use passive voice in their writing because of its descriptive nature, which helps develop an in-depth context of the topic. This is especially the case in formal writing, where active language is sometimes considered a bit simplistic and less effective at bringing out important sentence participants. With that said, however, overly use of passive voice in writing can often erode the action in the content, making it difficult for the reader to follow. If you’ve been looking for an effective way of how to change to active voice, our passive to active verb converter can help. It is easy to use, free, and readily available for use anytime.
Try our active voice detector today and make your paper written in the right voice!
