Behavioral Ecology: 'The first-person active voice is preferable to the impersonal passive voice.' British Medical Journal: 'Please write in a clear, direct, and active style.Write in the active [voice] and use the first person where necessary.' The Journal of Neuroscience: 'Overuse of the passive voice is a common problem in writing. This is an example of a sentence using the active voice. Image Caption: Sample active voice sentence with the subject performing the action described by the verb. Image Caption: The active voice sentence subject (watching a framed, mobile world) performs the action of reminding the speaker of something.

• • • In, the voice of a verb, also called diathesis and (rarely) the gender of a verb, describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its (subject, object, etc.). When the is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the. For example, in the sentence: The cat ate the mouse.

The verb 'ate' is in the active voice. However, in the sentence: The mouse was eaten by the cat. The verbal phrase 'was eaten' is passive. In the sentence: The hunter killed the bear.

The verb 'killed' is in the active voice, and the doer of the action is the 'hunter'. A passive version of the sentence is: The bear was killed by the hunter. Where the verbal phrase 'was killed' is followed by the word 'by' and then by the doer 'hunter'. In a from an active-voice to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an (optional). In the first example above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version.

The subject of the active-voice version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and can be left out entirely. Further information: The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the 'normal' case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Expandrive Seriale. Example: Kabaisa ate the potatoes. The verb ate indicates the active voice.