Often, the goal of writing is to inform the reader. News articles, handwritten notes, emails, Facebook posts — they can all give the reader information he didn't already have. But sometimes when ...

Often, the goal of writing is to inform the reader. News articles, hand-written notes, emails, Facebook posts — they can all give the reader information he didn’t already have. But sometimes when ...

One "rule" that many self-appointed experts on writing return to again and again is: "Don't use the passive!" Or, as some puckishly put it, "The passive voice should be avoided." The passive voice is ...

The passive voice is an important grammatical structure that appears in every form of written and spoken English. Knowledge of this construction is vital for reading and writing English in everyday ...

So I am going to surmise, as it is usually safe to do, that my students have been instructed along the way, that the passive voice is a wicked thing that, like Communism in the 1950s, can be lurking ...

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 great thing about being a grammar expert is you don’t have to know anything about grammar to be one. Just launch a blog, say whatever you think is true and bask in the certainty that no one will ...

THE cult of the active voice has an enduring influence in English grammar. From grade school onwards most everybody is taught that sentences in the active voice are the end-all and be-all of English, ...

William Germano finds it ironic that academics warn their students off the passive voice while peppering their own writing with that construction (“Passive Is Spoken Here,” The Chronicle Review, April ...