Okay guys, very simply, is the word "was" an active or passive word? Am a little bit unsure as to this sitution.
I don't see it as active or passive. It can be either. Example: 1) Bob was driving the car. (Active.) 2) The car was driven by Bob. (Passive.) Active or passive is a question of voice, not verb tense. Check out this.
Don't they teach grammar in high school anymore? "Was" is the past tense of the verb "to be" and standing alone, denotes equality or a state "he was alone" means "he was (and might not now be) in a state of being alone". By itself, it is not passive but just past tense, and perfectly appropriate. "She was a young girl, with a lithe, athletic body" Passive voice puts the action, and the recipient of the action, to the forefront, but hides or diminished the person or thing doing the action. The verb "to be" is used to form the passive voice with the past participle of the active verb. "He was hit on the head" The recipient "he" and the action of hitting are emphasized, but who or what did it is completely hidden. "He was hit on the head by a stranger" diminishes the role of the stranger doing the hitting and emphasizes the hittee, as opposed to "the stranger hit him on the head," which brings the stranger to the forefront. And of course , passive voice can be any tense: "he is being hit on the head" (present ongoing) "he will be hit on the head" (future). Passive voice is discouraged because of the above obscurity. However, it can be used strategically and carefully, to convey a sense of mystery "Suddenly, he was hit on the head" (but he did not know by what or by whom). The hitting was the item to emphasize. Still, there are better ways to do that without the passive voice. "Suddenly, a blinding flash exploded before his eyes as something crashed into his skull." All active voice, conveying the same mystery of what just happened without the passive voice. In technical writing it is almost totally forbidden, because it doesn't assign responsibility for the action. "System A's performance shall be verified by test and inspection." WHO is going to do the test and inspection? That should be written "The contractor, accompanied by government representatives, shall inspect system A for compliance, and conduct tests to verify System A's performance." Much clearer as to who is responsible for doing the work.
Depends. From what I remember from school, as well as the link that @minstrel posted, Active is when the subject is acted on something, Passive is when the subject is being acted on. Example: Karis was running from the mob. The mob was chasing Karis. In the first case, Karis' action was running. She was acting on the direct object, the mob. In the second, Karis, despite being the subject, didn't have an action. The direct object, the mob, was acting on Karis. So there's your difference. Active is when the subject acts on the direct object, passive is when the direct object acts on the subject.
Please don't listen to whoever told you "was" is passive. There is SO much misinformation out there about what passive voice actually is. Individual words cannot be said to be in active or passive voice - it's the whole sentence that matters. When somebody starts criticising an author for using "passive voice," it's generally a good idea to assume they're talking about something other than passive voice.
I think ‘was’ is one of those words that gets a bad press because sentences are often strengthened when it is removed. Rob was standing.../Rob stood... Rob was running.../Rob ran... Etc. I am certainly wary of ‘was’ in my writing and ask myself if there is a better way of saying what I want to say. But ‘was’ is just a word and sometimes the best word to use.
Oh, dear ...not quite. "The mob was chasing Karis" is not passive. The subject of the sentence is 'the mob.' That's an active sentence. Karis was running (from the mob.) The mob was chasing (Karis.) It's the same structure, just a different subject and verb in each case. Both are active sentences. If you want to transform that idea into passive voice, say, "Karis was (being) chased by the mob." That's passive. If you want a shortcut marker to spotting passive voice, you might want to forget the word 'was' and start looking for the word 'by' instead—or find instances where 'by' is implied, as in @Lew's example: He was hit on the head (by somebody.) He is being hit on the head (by somebody.) However don't fall into the trap of thinking every time you see the word 'by' it means you've got passive voice either. (The store by the gas station is still open. That's not passive voice! Neither is 'stand by me.' Or 'by the time I get to Phoenix...')
Neither. "Was" is often used in past tense passive voice constructions. But that's like saying that corn is often used in junk food. It doesn't mean that corn IS junk food. Actually, in the second sentence the mob is the subject. It's an active voice sentence. To make it passive, it would be something like: The mob was being led by Karis.
Very simple, the passive construct is the verb "to be" + the participle of the verb, mostly -ed. "He was chased" (by something) Verb "to be" + the gerund of the verb (-ing) is active voice, continuing action. "He was chasing" (something) Just to add to your grammatical confusion, you can make the verb "to be" into continuing state, same rule, verb "to be" + the gerund of the verb "to be". "He was being a fool" (at the time something happened) However, that is still just a form of the verb "to be" and can still be combined with the participle of another verb to make passive voice, continuing action "He was being chased" (by somebody, when something happened) Honestly, I am shocked. I could not have gotten out of 8th grade half a century ago without knowing that thoroughly. This does not bode well for the next generation of writers.
I think it's just that what's taught in the schools has changed through the decades. Things like diagramming sentences and teaching handwriting have also gone by the wayside, but it doesn't mean someone will be able to write fiction any better or worse. After all, schools are also where writers learned to use many different words for "said" for no good reason and the more modifiers, the better.
My understanding is that these days, teachers who don't know what passive voice is train students to be terrified of passive voice, with a net result that they train students to tie their writing into ugly knots to avoid all uses of "to be" verbs.
Sorry, @Carly Berg, if you can't write a grammatically correct sentence under all circumstances, or at least know the rule well enough to break it intentionally for effect, you will not have a future in writing. I have seen some self-published books in which 'its" and "it's" were transposed, another where ethnic groups were pluralized using 's "Dacian's" instead of "Dacians." and other, glaringly obvious errors that showed up often enough to be incorrect choices and not typos. Writing is all about using language to the fullest as a tool to express ideas, and to use it, you have to understand it. Just as a cabinet maker has to understand his tools. Just as an engineer has to be able to do arithmetic.
"The rules" have many exceptions anyway in the English language so it's quite possible, even the norm, to recognize that something is off without necessarily being required to cite a grammar rule or diagram a sentence or etc. I was both a student years ago and a teacher in recent years so I have a feel for how things have actually changed in the schools - and what difference it makes in practice, which may surprise us elders lol. It is also quite possible to learn the contents of an entire grammar book well and not be able to write fiction well, in other words. Learning to write a different way to some extent is not the same thing as not learning it at all nor automatically inferior to how we were taught decades ago. It doesn't mean that it would just be let go if a student incorrectly wrote "it's" instead of "its," to follow your example. In fact, I have seen plenty of older writers who I'd assume were taught the old way do this, too. To sum it up, I don't think we'll run out of new writers just because the teaching methods have changed somewhat in the past several decades. It's not that the grammar rules aren't taught at all but, in my experience, they aren't emphasized as much as they used to be in isolation from writing itself.
I completely agree! BRAVO! I couldn't tell you the difference between a noun and a verb if a gun were put to my head. Yet, I'm able to write complex paragraphs as shown below. I'm an artist, not a technician. My approach to writing is the same as it was when at 8 years of age, I began painting in oils. I copied, then emulated, and over time developed my own style. I learned to draw and paint with very little formal instruction. Now, I paint with words. “You know I would if my hands weren’t busy! I’m so sorry, Valerie. I don’t think anyone saw...” Rosemarie shut the doors behind her and entered the brightly lit apartment. An enormous oak table strewn with the instruments of the tailor’s trade took up the center of the room, on the far corner of which sat an elaborate birdcage, home to the second floor’s most thieving and untidy resident, an acquisitive black and white magpie that welcomed each visitor with the aplomb of a Bombay pickpocket. Rows of lavish fabrics and racks of costumes lined the facing walls. On the back wall, spanning the entire breadth of the room, was painted the most remarkable trompe l’oeil; it was of a sun-dappled forest clearing, where a sisterhood of muses frolicked amongst the ruins of a Roman garden. So absolute was the illusion that one might step into the mural and be inexplicably banished from the natural world. But all Rosemarie saw was her friend standing, statuesque and unashamed and returned to her so unexpectedly — as if one of the muses had broke free the bonds of pigment and brush strokes for a brief sojourn in the muck of flesh and bone.
I primarily care whether people can produce grammatically correct sentences. Whether they do that by explicitly learning the rules, or by internalizing the rules through lots of reading, I don't care. So I don't care all that much if people understand the difference between passive and active voice, UNLESS they run screaming from passive voice. It's the determined teaching of combined terror AND ignorance, with the end result of nonsensical ideas like "Avoid the word 'was'!" that I object to.
In my experience, it's not an issue of Kids These Days and what is or isn't being taught in high school so much as the common writing advice that gets passed around the internet -- often as pithy tips that aren't really elaborated on or explained. "Here are two hundred words you can use instead of that evil syllable 'said', and by the way, never use the word 'was' because something something passive voice is bad probably universally because 'passive' sounds negative, right?" I dunno, I didn't go to college or finish high school, so maybe it's bad advice that's part of academia as well, but my education, at least, didn't include misinformation about 'was' and passive voice. I've exclusively started hearing that over the past few years, folded into the stock writing tips that get recycled over and over on the ol' internet.
I barely know formal grammar at all. I learned to write by reading fiction, not by reading grammar books. (I didn't know what passive voice even WAS until I had a weirdo editor of my fourth or fifth novel object to something because it was passive voice. I had to read up on passive voice in order to tell the editor to stop being an idiot and there was nothing wrong with the damn sentence. I lost that argument, but I never sent that company another book and they're now out of business, while I'm still out here happily writing and using passive voice whenever it's appropriate, so... we've all learned our lessons, I hope!)
I also had very, very little education in grammar. I barely know how to tell if a word is a noun or a verb or a... whatever else there is. I make a living as a writer and editor.
"Individual words cannot be said to be in active or passive voice - it's the whole sentence that matters." That's great. That's exactly what I was looking for. A bit of clarity on this issue. Thanks.
Largely, but not entirely true. There's a place for the "was" construction, depending on the nuance the writer wishes to convey. "Rob was running his usual three miles when the explosion happened" does not say the same thing as "Rob ran his usual three miles when the explosion happened." The former establishes a scene and then introduces a new element, while the latter says that two things happened at the same time.
I completely agree with the above. Sometimes was is absolutely the right word to convey the correct meaning. But, if it is not required I think there are often better ways to phase it.
But you both realize that you're NOT talking about passive voice, right? You seem to be talking about past continuous tense.
If you put your text into any spelling/style check software it'll keep complaining about passive voice until you have like 1 or 2 of these per 1kilowords... I might not be that good in English but, for some reason understood the question in a way that "passive" word there is not in the passive voice meaning. Like 1)"He was at school" vs 2)"He attended school". In the first case someone could just bring him to school and leave him there dead or sleeping The second example means that the guy was at least conscious while staying at school In this meaning, yes, in ex. 1 "was" is a passive word, and I feel like replacing it with something that describes the type of presence a bit more precisely.
