Monday, November 25 Passive to Active voice

Monday 11.26.18 Today is Cyber Monday, and it just might be the biggest one ever. Here's what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and Out the Door. By Doug Criss US-Mexico border   The border crossing in San Diego is back open this morning. It had been closed for several hours yesterday after a group of about 500 migrants rushed the border from the Mexican side, leading Border Patrol agents to fire tear gas at them. US Customs and Border Protection said the migrants threw projectiles that struck several agents. The incident marks an escalation of tensions that have been mounting since groups of Central American migrants began arriving in Tijuana a few weeks ago on their journey to try to gain entry to the US. Mexico says it will deport the migrants who attempted to rush the border. Click here for more photos.   Ukraine and Russia   There's an escalating standoff going on right now between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine says Russian boats opened fire on Ukrainian ships near Crimea, seizing three of them in the Kerch Strait. That's a key waterway of strategic interest for both countries. Later today, Ukrainian lawmakers will vote on whether to declare martial law, and the United Nations Security Council will hold an emergency meeting. The Kerch Strait is a vital economic lifeline for Ukraine, as it allows ships leaving the port city of Mariupol to access the Black Sea. It's also the closest point of access for Russia to Crimea, a peninsula Moscow annexed -- with much controversy -- in 2014.    California wildfires   The Camp Fire in Northern California is now 100% contained, but the death toll continues to rise. Crews found three more bodies over the holiday weekend, putting the number of dead at 85. About 249 people are still missing. Complete containment doesn't mean the fire is out. It means a fire line has been cut around the blaze, cutting it off from trees and other fuel. Since it started more than two weeks ago, the fire has destroyed almost 14,000 homes, 514 businesses and 4,265 other buildings. It's burned an area roughly the size of Chicago.   Yemen   Five of the biggest international aid organizations in the world have a message for the US: Stop supporting Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen or bear the blame for the widespread famine there. The agencies --  OXFAM, Care, International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and The Norwegian Refugee Council -- are all operating in Yemen right now. They say 14 million people are at risk of starving to death in Yemen unless the violence ends. A coalition led by the Saudis, with military support from the US, has battled Houthi rebels backed by Iran in Yemen for almost four years. The conflict has killed about 57,000 people. Peace talks are due to take place in Sweden in the next few weeks.   Weather   More than 10 million people are under a blizzard warning this morning as a big winter storm moves from the Midwest up to the Great Lakes. The storm forced the cancellation or delay of thousands of flights, just as millions of people were headed home after the Thanksgiving holiday. Whiteout conditions closed multiple roads in Kansas, while residents in Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa dealt with high winds. All of that snow and wicked wind will torment the Great Lakes region before moving on to the Northeast.

           Learning target: understanding and demonstrating the use of the active voice in lead writing. 

Newsleads are written in the active voice. Below is a review and practice examples. After reviewing the material, you will demonstrate that you can successfully change sentences from passive to active voice. 

Active and Passive Voice

A Brief Grammatical Refresher

PLEASE TAKE YOUR TIME AND READ CAREFULLY. THIS INFORMATION IS KEY TO WRITING A NEWS ARTICLE.
The key to understanding passive voice lies in accepting the fact that it's strictly a grammatical term which relates to how sentences are constructed. A quick grammar brush-up might be useful here. Read over the following:

The subject of a sentence is, essentially, what the sentence is about. It's usually a person, place, or thing. In most sentences, the subject is either doing some sort of action or being described. Almost all of the time, the subject is at the very beginning of an English sentence. (e.g. "Bob is silly.")

The object of a sentence appears at the opposite end, always after the action in the sentence. It, too, is usually a person, place or thing, and in most sentences it's the person, place, or thing to which the action is being done (e.g. "I laughed at Bob."). Not all sentences have objects, of course—just look at "Bob is silly," above.

Verbs are action words. Sometimes they're just used to describe states of existence (e.g. "Bob is silly."), but in most sentences you write they'll be actions (e.g. "I laughed at Bob.")

Understanding passive voice really all comes down to verbs. Whenever you put a verb in a sentence (that is: all the time), you are using one of two kinds of "voice," which is really just a fancy way of saying that you're deciding how "to indicate the relation of the subject [of the sentence] to the action." (Definition quoted from OED Online).

Agency is also very important—it's what describes the parts of a sentence in relation to the action. Both the subject and the object can be either an agent (the thing doing the action) or a patient (the thing having the action done to it), in addition to being grammatical subject and object. So, for example, in the sentence "Bob hit John," Bob is the agent (he's hitting John), and John is the patient (he's being hit by Bob).

Now, on to passive voice.

A Concise Explanation of Passive and Active Voice

There are two types of voice in English: passive and active.

Active voice is the most common, and results when the subject of a sentence is also the agent. That is, when the subject is the person, place, or thing doing the action. So you might say, for example, "I hit John with a stick." That's in the active voice because you, the subject of the sentence, are also the agent—you are doing the action, hitting John with a stick. (John is the object, and also the patient, being hit.)

Passive voice, on the other hand, results when the object of the sentence is doing the action (or is the agent), and the subject is receiving it (or is the patient). To continue abusing John, we might say "John was hit with a stick." This is passive voice because John, the subject of the sentence, is the one being acted upon.

To spot passive voice, here's all you need to do:

Examine the relationship between the subject, object, and verb of a sentence. If the object is the thing doing the verb, the sentence is passive. If the subject is the thing doing the verb, the sentence is active.

Problems with Passive Voice

For the most part, you probably want to write in the active voice when possible. That's because sentences written in active voice are generally clearer, more direct, and more compact.

The main problems with passive voice, then, are as follows:

It can be wordy. A lot of the time, passive voice requires awkward, lengthy, convoluted sentences instead of short, punchy, straightforward ones. "I found Jim's body odour atrocious" will end up "Jim's body odour was found to be atrocious by me"—yikes!

Most of the time, moving passive voice sentences to active voice will tighten your prose, make it more readable, and as a result confuse your readers less.

It can be vague. Take this example: "Bob was hit by a stick." With a sentence like that in your story, readers are going to be missing some important information: who was doing the hitting? Too much vagueness like this isn't only off-putting, but it can actually confuse your readers about what's going on so much that they'll have to either closely re-read the whole scene, or just give up and go read something else.

By moving vague passive voice constructions into active voice, you can make your story's action crystal clear.

The passive voice can lead to other grammatical errors. Know about "dangling modifiers"? These are "a word or phrase that modifies a word not clearly stated in the sentence" (Definition quoted from Purdue OWL).

 Most of the time, they're fine, but sometimes passive voice can mix with dangling modifiers to leave you with a sentence that doesn't quite say what you think it does.

The example the Purdue OWL gives is perfect: "Having finished the assignment, the TV was turned on." Unlike the active version of that sentence, "Having finished the assignment, Jill turned on the TV," a passive voice version accidentally describes the TV as doing the assignment, not Jill.

Oops? When you have dangling modifiers, you may want to make sure you're using active voice in the main clause of the sentence, or you can accidentally ascribe actions to objects (and patients) instead of subjects (and agents).    

     Please rewrite the following sentences, changing from passive to active voice. Note that you might have to create a subject in some of the sentences. (graded assignment)

 1.  More than 7,000 cigarettes a year are consumed by a pack-a-day smoker.

2.  The smell of fresh-cut grass had never before been known by most of these children.

3.  All necessary repairs will be performed by a licensed company.

4.  The impropriety of unauthorized copying is often overlooked by users in an educational setting.

5.  An Assignment Review Board should be appointed by the Senate Committee on Judiciary Affairs.

6.  The Board will be given authority by the company to approve job descriptions and training programs.

7.  Similar information must have been given to Jason. 

8.  The children should be put to bed before 10:00 p.m. 

9.  The public was told very little about the incident at the prison.  

10. Detailed experiments to assess the resiliency of the new product were conducted in 2002 by engineers from the company.    

11.         For several years, the twins were brought up by their great aunt.

12.         His parents were greatly concerned about his lack of manners.

13.         The stand of old-growth pines was ripped out by the force of the twin tornadoes.

 14.         Nearly one-third of the software company’s workforce was impacted by the recession.

15.         The dance troupe’s final performance was cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales.