Skip to Main Content

Rams Write

Here you'll find a student-generated guide to writing and composition.

Converting Between Active and Passive Voice

What does the passive voice look like?

A common way the passive voice spreads out the action in a sentence is with a "by" phrase. For example, "the ball was hit by the bat."  

Sounds funny, right?

To change this into the active voice, you want to move the subject to the beginning of the sentence: "The bat hit the ball." 

Active v. Passive Voices

In an active voice sentence, the subject is doing an action to another source. In a passive voice, the subject is the one who is receiving the action.