Use of Passive Voice

In a essay (i.e critical essay about a piece of literature) is it bad to use the passive voice? When do writers use passive voice? It seems that writers are restricted if they cannot use passive voice.

 

Well..I am not certain about essays. I tend to shy away from passive voice in anything i do..but i write fiction..so bleh..im not a lot of help with that..

I will however do some research on that for you

 

What's passive voice again?

 

Ok heres a bit I found on passive voice..

As I thought, you really want to avoid using passive voice in writing. It tends to make the reader lose interest quickly..but heres a brief explanation to clarify it.

"passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject "receives" an action. Active voice produces a sentence in which the subject "performs" an action. Passive voice often produces wordy, unclear sentences, whereas active voice produces clearer more concise sentences.

To change a sentence from passive to active voice, determine who or what performs that action and use that person or thing as the "subject" of the sentence.

Passive voice occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. Passive sentence are fairly easy to spot. Look for forms of "to be" such as is, am are, was, were, has, have been followed by a past participle ( a form of a verb ending in -ed , though there are exception to this rule such as "paid" and "driven". "

Ok well theres some stuff that I found on passive voice. From everything I read passive voice is to be avoided EVEN in essays.

I will try to post some more on this subject later. This is actually a problem for me in my writing, so I am learning as I google. Hope this helps some of you as well.

 

So then passive voice is forming a sentence where the object appears to be the subject rather than the actual subject?

 

Yeah, like "was driven." That's bad.

Of course, I'm a horrible offender.

ETA: Ooops . . . . a triple post. Stupid internet connection. Sorry. A mod can delete the next two, if they want.

 

Here is a good article I found...

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/passivevoice.html

 

By Passive do you mean neutral? If so writers use it so that their work isn't influenced overly by their opinion. This is good for works such as historical essays.