![]() ![]() Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly, and I would be able to extricate myself, and my clients, from the scheme." As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. An example of this incorrect usage can be found in the following extract from an article from The New Yorker about Bernard Madoff (bolding and italics added bold text indicates the verbs misidentified as passive voice): Occasionally, authors express recommendations about use of the passive unclearly or misapply the term "passive voice" to include sentences of this type. For instance, "There were mistakes" and "Mistakes occurred" are both in the active voice. Not every expression that serves to take focus away from the performer of an action is an instance of passive voice. Though the passive can be used for the purpose of concealing the agent, this is not a valid way of identifying the passive, and many other grammatical constructions can be used to accomplish this. " Being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep."." Have you ever been kicked by an elephant?".It can be used in a number of different grammatical contexts for instance, in declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses: The agent (the doer of the action) may be specified using a prepositional phrase with the preposition by, but this is optional. The essential components, in English, are a form of the stative verb be (or sometimes get ) and the past participle of the verb denoting the action. The passive voice is a specific grammatical construction. Contemporary style guides discourage excessive use of the passive voice but generally consider it to be acceptable in certain situations, such as when the patient is the topic of the sentence, when the agent is unimportant and therefore omitted, or when the agent is placed near the end of a sentence as a means of emphasis. ![]() The English passive voice is used less often than the active voice, but frequency varies according to the writer's style and the given field of writing. Similarly, the complement of a preposition may be promoted, leaving a stranded preposition-e.g. A sentence's indirect object may be promoted to the subject position-e.g. Įnglish allows a number of additional passive constructions that are not possible in many other languages with analogous passive formations to the above. The English passive voice typically involves forms of the verbs to be or to get followed by a passive participle as the subject complement-sometimes referred to as a passive verb. The initial examples rewritten in the active voice yield: Above, the agent is omitted entirely, but it may also be included adjunctively while maintaining the passive voice: In sentences using the active voice, the subject is the performer of the action-referred to as the agent. The recipient of a sentence's action is referred to as the patient. In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle.
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