The iLexicon system can handle active/passive voice conversion of fairly complex English sentences. I gave examples of the underlying verb conjugation mechanism in this article and this one. Today, I am going to give examples of the conversion of complete sentences.
Apr 24, 2021 The active voice is always the best choice. It is more precise and much easier for readers to understand. All you need to do is use a grammar checker to find the passive structures in your text. Then you can re-write your sentences in the active form. Is the passive voice a writing mistake? When you use it too often, yes, it is a writing fault. Active/Passive voice using Modals: The modal verbs consist of will, would, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must which are used with main verbs to express ability, probability, obligation, advice etc. To convert active voice having modal into passive voice, auxiliary verb “be” is added after modal in sentence.
Here is an example of active to passive voice conversion:
Active To Passive Voice
The above is a snapshot of the interactive session in my Sicstus Prolog IDE. You can see that the sentence “he drank milk” has been correctly converted to “milk was drunk by him”.
Here are some more examples of active to passive voice conversion:
The last example is a special case that uses the preposition “to” instead of “by” in the passive voice.
What about passive voice to active voice? The following is based on the earlier example:
Passive To Active Voice
It works as expected. Here are some more conversions:
Notice how the pronouns in the first example are suitably modified while changing the voice. The last example is a special case where the subject is missing. The word “someone” is introduced in this case when converting to active voice.
Instead of converting from one voice to the other, we can give an active voice sentence and a passive voice sentence and check if they agree.
Validating Active/Passive Sentence Pairs
Note that the system flags the second example as incorrect. The correct conversion of the active voice sentence “he drank the sweet milk” is “the sweet milk was drunk by him“.
Here are more examples of this:
As you would have guessed, the first example shows incorrect conversion. The correct conversion is “the story book is being read by peter“.
iLexicon’sconversion engine first parses the given sentence to extract the Subject, Predicate and Object. Then it applies verb conjugation and active/passive conversion rules, and finally emits the transformed structure. Below is a snapshot of the core logic (Prolog):
The Core Conversion Logic
It was challenging to work on this part but I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Have a great weekend!
Active voice means that a sentence has a subject that acts upon its verb. Passive voice means that a subject is a recipient of a verb’s action. You may have learned that the passive voice is weak and incorrect, but it isn’t that simple. When used correctly and in moderation, the passive voice is fine.
In English grammar, verbs have five properties: voice, mood, tense, person, and number; here, we are concerned with voice. The two grammatical voices are active and passive.
What’s the difference between active and passive voice?
Active voice
When the subject of a sentence performs the verb’s action, we say that the sentence is in the active voice. Sentences in the active voice have a strong, direct, and clear tone. Here are some short and straightforward examples of active voice.
Active voice examples
Monkeys adore bananas.The cashier counted the money.
The dog chased the squirrel.
All three sentences have a basic active voice construction: subject, verb, and object. The subject monkey performs the action described by adore. The subject the cashier performs the action described by counted. The subject the dog performs the action described by chased. The subjects are doing, doing, doing—they take action in their sentences. The active voice reminds us of the popular Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”
Passive voice
A sentence is in the passive voice, on the other hand, when the subject is acted on by the verb. The passive voice is always constructed with a conjugated form of to be plus the verb’s past participle. Doing this usually generates a preposition as well. That sounds much more complicated than it is—passive voice is actually quite easy to detect. For these examples of passive voice, we will transform the three active sentences above to illustrate the difference.
Passive voice examples
Passive To Active Voice Converter Free Online
Bananas are adored by monkeys.The money was counted by the cashier.
The squirrel was chased by the dog.
Let’s take a closer look at the first pair of sentences, “Monkeys adore bananas” and “Bananas are adored by monkeys.” The active sentence consists of monkeys (subject) + adore (verb) + bananas (object). The passive sentence consists of bananas (object) + are adored (a form of to be plus the past participle adored) + by (preposition) + monkeys (subject). Making the sentence passive flipped the structure and necessitated the preposition by. In fact, all three of the transformed sentences above required the addition of by.
When to use active and passive voice
Using the active voice conveys a strong, clear tone and the passive voice is subtler and weaker. Here’s some good advice: don’t use the passive voice just because you think it sounds a bit fancier than the active voice.
That said, there are times the passive voice is useful and called for. Take “The squirrel was chased by the dog,” for example. That sentence construction would be helpful if the squirrel were the focus of your writing and not the dog.
A good rule of thumb is to try to put the majority of your sentences in the active voice, unless you truly can’t write your sentence in any other way.
How to change a sentence in passive voice to active voice
Here is an example of a business communication that could be strengthened by abandoning the passive voice.
That sentence is not incorrect, but it does sound a bit stiff and dishonest. It sounds less trustworthy than it could—almost evasive. Who wants to do business with a company that avoids taking full responsibility by slipping into formal passive voice territory? Face the responsibility head on instead. Own it.
Passive To Active Voice Converter
To make that sentence active rather than passive, I identified the subject: we. It was “our company” that was responsible.