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Old 09-29-2006, 02:34 PM   #4
Ghoulish Delight
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The basics of passive voice:

Essentially, whenever the subject of the sentence is NOT the doer of the verb, you're in passive voice.

example: The car was driven by Johnny = passive voice because the subject is "the car", but the verb ("driven") is being done by the object ("Johnny")

example 2: Jane drove the car = active voice

Personally, while writing does tend to sound better when it's avoided, I don't see a need to be fanatical about it. It's worth taking a look at and seeing if you can come up with an active way to say something, but if you have to do gramatical calisthenics to wrap the sentence around it when passive voice will give you a clean, suscinct option, don't worry about it.

And no, I wouldn't put a percentage on it. If the best option for a sentence is passive, leave it passive.
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