http://www.ck12.org Chapter 7. Tone and Style
The verbs in the sentences below are in passive voice. Rewrite the sentences and change the verbs to active voice.
Make any other changes, if needed:
- New skills are learned by students when they are given opportunities by their teachers to take risks.
- In Brown’s article, it is argued that the secret prisons project was carried out by the Secret Service to allow
high risk criminals to be questioned without respect to international law.
- According to the local newspaper, it is believed that the discussion is polarized by U.S. citizens’ beliefs about
how much the government should intervene in the economy.
Points to Consider
a. When is it appropriate to use passive voice?
b. When is it not appropriate to use passive voice?Nominalization
In Lesson 3 (Sentence Order), we learned how to turn nouns into verbs as a strategy to place characters in focus
and add power to them. What we did was an exercise ofde-nominalizing;we were turningnounsintoactions. A
nominalizationis just the opposite, and it occurs when we turna verb or an adjectiveintoa noun:
Example 1- Bob’sintention was to speak to Kate.
Example 2- Ourpresentation was about a new plan.
Example 3- We did asurvey of 30 people for our study.
Example 4- Jack got the job because of hisproficiency in English.
Using nominalization in the wrong context may remove the attention and focus you need for your characters
and verbs. Sentences containing too many nominalizations can also end up wordy. In order to correct a
nominalization,