Tutor profile: Sarah C.

What is the difference between active and passive voice?

In English Grammar, "voice" is used to decide whether the verb is working actively or passively in a sentence. In this way, there are two broad classifications of voice,active or passive. If in a sentence, the subject (the noun) acts as the doer of the action (the verb), then it is called an active voice. On the other hand, if the subject acts as the target or receiver of the action performed, then the voice is called passive voice. Now, let’s look at these examples to understand them correctly: Active: Maria followed the thief. Passive: The thief was followed by Maria. Active: She told me the truth. Passive: The truth was told to me by Maria. In the given examples, you might have noticed, that when the sentence is in the active voice, the focus is on the subject, but when we converted the sentence to passive voice, the focus is shifted to the action.

How would you paraphrase the following lines from The Canterbury Tales: "For gile." The knyte sayde, "Be sayn Jon" And smythely con he smyle "I fayth I welde rit non Ne non wil welde te quile"

Looking at the Old English can be very challenging to decipher, so you have to start thinking of phonetic "friends" as I usually say. This in fact read " The knight said, 'By Saint John' and well knew he to smile, 'In faith I wedded nobody and none will marry me'

How should you change the following sentence to make it grammatically correct: The recent discovery of the short films and the personal diary of the renowned inventor allow historians to appreciate his genius even more.

This sentence features an error of subject-verb agreement. The subject of this sentence is singular: "the recent discovery," though the following elaboration of short films and a personal diary can be misleading they do not change the grammatical subject of the sentence. Therefore the verb should be "allows."