Eli5 How does passive/active voice work???
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In high school I had a totally nutty, eccentric English teacher whose class was comprised of nothing but watching classic (Shakespeare etc.) movies and writing essays about them. This teacher was notorious for leaving the classroom for *very* lengthy periods of time, to the point that he was truly legendary — but I digress.
Literally the only thing I remember him teaching us was that we could **never** use helping verbs (am, is, are, was, were, etc.) in our writing; we always had to find a way to use “action verbs” instead. My classmates and I had no idea what he was teaching us, or why he wanted us to avoid helping verbs at all costs. At the end of the semester, each student would go to the podium at the front of the classroom, read their essay out loud, and then write their own grade in the gradebook before returning to their seat. That teacher was such a strange man.
In any case, I think I was in my 30s (as a practicing lawyer) before I realized that he was teaching us to write in the active voice:
– Passive: John *was* killed … (by whom?)
– Active: Bill *killed* John
… and that’s how I learned to hate the passive voice.
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