Grammar teachers furiously drill into every learner's head that the sentence "Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat" is superior to "Andres was hit violently by Emilio with a bat." One major use of the passive voice is, in fact, to leaven such verbal performances — to provide low-energy counterpoints to the high-energy semantic field created by active-voice sentences. Well, it's that we should write them or say them in the most natural way possible — using the active voice if called for, but never hesitating to use the passive voice when logic and good sense demands it. Unless you are a student forced by your English teacher to stick to the active voice on pain of failing in the subject, or perhaps a journalist bound by an inflexible standing order by your editors never to use the passive voice, the active voice should only be a secondary consideration in writing your sentences. Our prose and our speech will thus be squandering that latitude and opportunity by blindly and inflexibly deferring to the cult of the active voice.

Source: Manila Times June 22, 2022 14:12 UTC