Introduction
Essay writing is probably the most difficult task in written English. But who doesn’t want to score high and get good grades? Yes, you are right. Everyone does want good grades and appraisal of their work. But this fineness and appraisal come through hard work. You have to work on many of the things before you are able to produce a good piece of an essay. These things include proper use of grammar, punctuation, active voice, and passive voice. Hence, if you want to learn the proper use of active and passive voice, this guide is for you. I hope you won’t need to wander around once you give this article a proper read.
But before jumping straight into the use of active and passive voice in the essay. Let’s discuss a bit about essay writing and its importance. An essay is a short piece of writing outlining the perspective or story of an author. It is commonly combined with a story, a paper, or an article. Essays can be both formal and informal. Formal essays are academic in tone and deal with serious subjects. At the same time, informal essays are not academic in nature and talk about general subjects.
Essays are further divided into four types. They also have a proper format to follow. But I will not be discussing these things as they will distract from the original topic. We will discuss only the use of active and passive voice in law essay writing service.
Importance of Essay Writing
There are several reasons why essays are important not only for instructors but also for students. They can help you improve your writing skills, think more creatively, and organise your thoughts. In fact, writing good admission essays in the UK and other nations can lead to an offer letter from a university. This will pave the way for a brighter future.
Active and Passive Voice in Essay Writing
We can often see the use of active and passive voices in academic and scientific writings. Both terms have their own meaning and situations where you can use them. Active voice makes the sentences easy to read for the readers. In contrast, passive voice makes the sentences complicated and lengthy. Hence, to write a good essay, you need to have a grip on active and passive voice.
Example
Let’s understand it with the help of an example. In this example, I will demonstrate how active and passive voice can increase difficulty in the readability of the sentence.
Active voice
Harry ate six nuggets at dinner.
The organisation requires staff to watch a safety video every year.
The wedding planner is making all the reservations.
Passive Voice
All the reservations are being made by the wedding planner.
The staff are required by the organisation to watch a safety video every year.
At dinner, six nuggets were eaten by Harry.
In the example above, you would have noticed that using passive voice makes the sentence complicated. Active voice is easy to read and understand.
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Active Voice – Meaning and Usage
A sentence with an active voice has a subject who acts on the verb. We say a sentence is in the active voice when the subject of the sentence performs the action of the verb. The active voice has a forceful, direct, and clear tone in its sentences. Here are a few simple and short examples of active voice.
Monkey love bananas.
The cashier counted the money.
You can see how easy it is to read and understand the meaning of active voice. All of the above examples have a basic active voice structure. This structure consists of subject, verb, and object. The subject monkey performs the action on object bananas described by verb love.
Usage
In speech and writing, we use the active verb form to describe actions and events. Active sentences are used mostly in informal essay writing. Where author also uses 3rd person subject.
Passive Voice – Meaning and Usage
A sentence is in passive voice form when the subject is acted on by the verb. The passive voice is made up of a conjugated form of to be and the past participle of the verb. This usually results in the generation of a preposition. The passive voice sentences are much more difficult than they sound from their structure.
Here are a few examples to see the complexity of sentences when used in passive voice form.
- Bananas are loved by monkeys.
- The money was counted by the cashier.
- Now let’s take a closer look at the active and passive voices of the first example.
- Monkeys (Subject) + Love (Verb) + Bananas (Object)
- Bananas (Object) + are loved (form of to be plus past participate) + by (preposition) + Monkeys (Subject).
From the analysis above, I hope you will have a clear idea about structuring the passive voice. The use of passive voice results in the creation of prepositions and complexity in the sentence.
When to Use Active and Passive Voice in Essay Writing
The active voice has a stronger, clearer tone than the passive voice. The passive voice is more delicate and weak. Here’s good advice: don’t use the passive voice simply because it sounds more attractive than the active voice.
However, there are conditions when using the passive voice is good. For example, “The squirrel was attacked by the dog.” A rule of thumb is that you should write all sentences in the active voice in essay writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t use passive voice in your sentence. You can use the passive voice where there is no other way.
Conclusion
In the end, I would say before dissertation help or essay writing. It would help if you learnt about the difference between active and passive voices. You can’t use the passive voice because it looks fancy. You should take into consideration the understanding level of your reader. Hence, a sound knowledge of the difference between these terms will help you produce a sound essay.