Character thoughts quotes or no

I think it is.

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-active-and-passive-voice.html

 

I think so as well.

 

Yes?

I'm not sure where the confusion is coming from - passive voice is weird in how complicated people want to make it. (And it's weird how important people seem to think it is!)

The subject of the sentence (the chemicals) aren't really doing anything - rather, someone else is doing something with them. So it's passive voice, regardless of the verb tense you use.

("had been" is just a different verb tense of "were").

I'm starting to doubt myself - this seems really clear, but other people seem to find it confusing, so maybe I'm missing an entire level of meaning or something? But I don't think so...

 

I think it's clearer if you take out the "by a large crowd" part in your mind. That's not really part of the subject/verb part of the sentence, so it's the equivalent of "by zombies". And without the "by a large crowd" it's "He was being listened to." So the people doing the action (the listening) aren't actually part of the subject/verb part of the sentence, so... passive voice.

 

the way it was explained to me, and it could very well be another another misguided rule of thumb; who is doing what= active/ what was done by whom= passive. is that too far off the mark?

 

It's passive voice, yep. Maybe your confusion is that "being listened to" suggests that he's speaking and that sounds active? But passive voice isn't about whether the subject is being active in the overall scene that you're visualizing, but about whether he's the one actively 'doing' the sentence's verb. He's not listening, he's being listened to, so it's passive.

 

I put the large crowd into my example because I wanted to be able to reverse it. He was being listened to can't really be reversed just as it is. Somebody has to be doing the listening in active voice.

 

I heard it's either italics or Roman type for monologue thoughts (and there's a sticky at the top of this forum subsection about this very thing ) but quotation marks for dialogue, even if it's telepathic/thought-based.

 

Italics or some other font emphasis, like bold, seems common in SF/F when you're dealing with telepathic conversation or other magical dialogue.

 

I prefer to use italics for internal monologue. If a character has telepathy and is communicating with someone else I use single inverted commas.
I feel that steerpike might be on to something though. His take on the statement makes things flow better.

 

I hadn't been thinking of telepathic communication. My story actually has people with embedded computers so they can communicate but since that's still a form a talking from one person to another I use normal quotes for it. It's only when someone is speaking to themselves I was unsure of.