21st Century Grammar Handbook

of the sentences constructed in the passive. Not much can be made of such emphasis,
since the device used to stress something naturally is weak, less clear, and, in a word, passive.
W
ORD ORDER
Changing word order and gaining variety through occasional use of the passive can help a document full of simple, direct, active statements. Again, the change is not particularly forceful by nature, but it is there as a device. See order of words.
O
BSCURING
S
ENTENCE
A
GENT
When it is not important to make clear who is acting or if there is a good reason to obscure the active agent in a sentence, the passive works well. That is why so much government documentation, political rhetoric, and advertising is couched in the passive. If no active party is evident, no one can be blamed, held to promises, or made accountable for claims. Advertising sometimes takes the simpler path of omitting the subject “Improved!”
If any of these considerations lead you to use the passive, make sure during your
editing, revision, and proofreading cycles to avoid too much passive voice. Also take care to observe all the rules and requirements of agreement and consistency. Longer passive constructions naturally make subject, verb, and agent somewhat remote from one another, thereby enhancing the possibility that you will lose sight of the number
or person with which the verb must agree. This is particularly true if the verb and prepositional agent phrase are close together while the subject is fairly far away.
Then writers tend to make the verb agree with the number and person of the agent rather than the true subject of the sentence. WRONG The apple, fallen from a tree that stood for eons in the farmer’s yard, were eaten by the hogs RIGHT The apple was eaten by….”
Consistency should be maintained by making all clauses in a sentence either active
or passive but not mixing voices in the same sentence. This is particularly true when a series of more than two clauses is joined together. WRONG The dog barks loudly,
the cow stumbles toward the meadow, and the pig is herded toward the pen by the farmhand RIGHT The dog … and the farmhand herds the pig toward the pen.”
Past tense. Verbs indicate the time of the actions or conditions they depict by changing forms. Actions or conditions that took place before now or in the time the speaker or writer assumes to be now are said to be in the past and are depicted by

the past tense. Most verbs form their past tenses by adding d or ed to their main forms walk, walked type, typed cook, cooked But there are many verbs that change shape in the past and other forms irregularly. Seethe entry on irregular verbs
and the individual entries for those verbs, which provide more details on how they are formed and used. Also seethe entry on tenses for the more elaborately formed and less commonly used variants on the simple past tense.

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