Active/ Passive — Activity

“The company terminated the employee” and “the employee was terminated” say the same underlying fact but put the emphasis in very different places — and legal and official writing chooses between them deliberately, not by accident. Learning to convert confidently between active and passive voice is a small, mechanical skill that shows up in almost every paper this university sets.

In two minutes

In the active voice the subject performs the action; in the passive voice the subject receives the action, and converting between them requires moving the object into subject position, changing the verb to a form of 'to be' plus the past participle, and placing the original subject after 'by' if it is mentioned at all.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – I on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.