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Hi! This is Laura Turner. And today we're going to talk about how to change passive
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voice to active voice. This is probably, one of the most important writing lessons. You
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will ever learn. In college, my hardest writing class. In my hardest writing class, I wrote
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a paper for my professor. And he gave me a little grade on it. And he passed it back
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to me. And he said. He had circled actually, all of my is 's. And he said, fix this. This
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is bad. And I had no idea, what he was talking about. I was writing the entire essay in passive
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voice. And what that means is, is I was placing a participle, a verb followed by a participle.
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As opposed to an actual verb. So is going, is becoming, was doing. You know, things like
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this. We don't even notice that we do this, in our writing. You can actually make a good
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paper into a perfect paper, by going through yourself. And tabbing down and trying to find,all
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of your is. And you're going to find a lot. And once you find them, you need to change
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them to make it active. And so what I did in my class. What I actually did, go through
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and I tried to move the verb into the right place. And fix all of my sentences. Let's
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just an example today. The sentence that I've written here is, 'the poem's narrator is the
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mother'. And this is passive. The way to make this active, is to take an actual verb. The
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mother narrates the poem. And put that noun at the end of the sentence. As in the subject.
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So now you go from the poem's narrator is the mother. To the mother narrates the poem.
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And you can see also, why it's called active voice. Because now the mother is actually
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doing something. The verb is actually making the subject do this. Another example is, the
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glass was broken by the cat. The way to make that into an active form is. The cat broke
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the glass. It's completely simple. But it's something you'll probably miss because that's
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a perfectly fine sentence. The glass was broken by the cat. But in order to make it active,
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The cat broke the glass. You see what I mean. So just go back through your essay, the next
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time you finish it. And see how many passive words, you have used. And try to impress your
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professor by changing them to active voice.