Hi! This is Laura Turner. And today we're going to talk about how to change passive
voice to active voice. This is probably, one of the most important writing lessons. You
will ever learn. In college, my hardest writing class. In my hardest writing class, I wrote
a paper for my professor. And he gave me a little grade on it. And he passed it back
to me. And he said. He had circled actually, all of my is 's. And he said, fix this. This
is bad. And I had no idea, what he was talking about. I was writing the entire essay in passive
voice. And what that means is, is I was placing a participle, a verb followed by a participle.
As opposed to an actual verb. So is going, is becoming, was doing. You know, things like
this. We don't even notice that we do this, in our writing. You can actually make a good
paper into a perfect paper, by going through yourself. And tabbing down and trying to find,all
of your is. And you're going to find a lot. And once you find them, you need to change
them to make it active. And so what I did in my class. What I actually did, go through
and I tried to move the verb into the right place. And fix all of my sentences. Let's
just an example today. The sentence that I've written here is, 'the poem's narrator is the
mother'. And this is passive. The way to make this active, is to take an actual verb. The
mother narrates the poem. And put that noun at the end of the sentence. As in the subject.
So now you go from the poem's narrator is the mother. To the mother narrates the poem.
And you can see also, why it's called active voice. Because now the mother is actually
doing something. The verb is actually making the subject do this. Another example is, the
glass was broken by the cat. The way to make that into an active form is. The cat broke
the glass. It's completely simple. But it's something you'll probably miss because that's
a perfectly fine sentence. The glass was broken by the cat. But in order to make it active,
The cat broke the glass. You see what I mean. So just go back through your essay, the next
time you finish it. And see how many passive words, you have used. And try to impress your
professor by changing them to active voice.