If you tuned in to last week’s blog posts, you’ll have seen some guidelines for self-editing that touch on basic grammatical edits, with the active versus passive voice as one of them. Friday’s post offered a general overview of the differences, but let’s dive a little deeper into the nuances of these two sentence structures.

Simply put, the subject completes the sentence’s action in the active voice, while the subject receives the action in the passive voice. Therefore, the typical structure of a sentence in the active voice reads “subject-verb-object” versus “object-verb-subject” in the passive voice.” The passive voice is also easily recognized by its use of “to be” verbs such as “was” or “will be,” followed by a past tense verb. For example:

Active Voice – Diego (subject) broke (verb) the glass (object).

Passive Voice – The glass (object) was broken (verb) by Diego (subject).

In both sentences, Diego is the one doing the breaking and the glass is the thing being broken. The differences lie in the flow and what draws the reader’s attention. In the active voice, the focus is on Diego, while in the passive voice, the focus is on the glass. The active voice is usually the best option. As seen in the example above, the first sentence is more precise and energetic while conveying the same message as the second but with fewer filler words. It’s easier for the reader to remain engaged when reading text in the active voice. Also, in most sentences, you typically want the subject to be the sentence’s focus and the action’s perpetrator. Therefore, the active voice is the way to go in most cases.

That said, you may have learned never to use the passive voice, but this isn’t necessarily true. If you want to emphasize the object of the sentence or use an unnamed subject, then you could use the passive voice.

Drawing upon the examples above, say you’re writing a paragraph about the glass with little mention of Diego. In this context, it would be best to write “The glass was broken.” Since the glass is the center focus, suddenly including a subject might be distracting. Similarly, the passive voice can be used when you don’t want to include a subject. For example, if you’re writing a mystery novel, you might not want to include a character’s identity and leave the subject ambiguous.

Ultimately, neither voice is grammatically incorrect, you just want to pay attention to the sentence’s context when choosing which one to use.