Grammar girl here, it's time to take another look at active and passive voice.

I've talked about passive voice before, in episode 232, but it's still such a frequent

source of confusion that we're going to explore it again from a different angle.

I'll start with a question that Dave, from Fort Leavenworth Kansas, asked.

He's following a rulebook that says, quote,

a verb in the passive voice uses any form of to-be plus the past participle of the main verb,

for example, were completed and is requested, unquote.

But Dave thinks that might be an inadequate definition, and he's on to something.

It's a pretty good quick and dirty definition, but it misses some less typical cases of passive

voice.

Here's what I said in my earlier podcast.

In an active sentence, this subject is doing the action.

A straightforward example is the sentence, Steve loves Amy.

Steve is the subject, and he is doing the action.

He loves Amy, the object of the sentence.

In passive voice, the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position.

Instead of saying Steve loves Amy, I would say Amy is loved by Steve.

The subject of the sentence becomes Amy, but she isn't doing anything.

Rather, she's just the recipient of Steve's love.

That's also not a bad quick and dirty definition, if I may say so, but it's also not perfect either.

Like Dave's manual's definition, it also misses some of the less typical cases of passive

voice.

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