Eli5 How does passive/active voice work???
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When you have a sentence, you typically have a subject, a verb, and an “object.”
* The verb is the action.
* The subject is the thing that performs the action.
* The object is the thing that is acted on.
Active and Passive voice exist because the came idea can be structured in two different ways
Typically, you want to use “active voice” which simply means that the sentence is structured so the subject performs the action on the object: **I made a mistake.**
* “I” is the subject
* “made” is the verb
* “mistake” is the object
But you can also structure the same basic idea such that what should really be the object becomes the subject. This is passive voice: **Mistakes were made.**
This hides the agency (who is performing the action?). It is “passive” and generally undesirable.
Passive voice has its uses, but writer often make the mistake of using it when they should really use active voice, resulting in wishy-washy or weak prose.
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