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ELA 12: 1.27 Actively Passing the Buck 152 Views


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Description:

No animals were harmed and no passive voice was used in the making of this video... well, maybe scratch that last part.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:01

No Well even if he only paid the slightest amount

00:04

of attention and is ed you probably know that being

00:07

active is better than being passive You don't win marathons

00:11

by sitting on the couch and if you are winning

00:14

marathons by sitting on your couch is probably being pulled

00:17

by a car or something which is kind of ingenious

00:20

might give that a shot at the olympics but believe

00:22

it or not this insight about the active being better

00:25

than the passive has direct applications when it comes to

00:27

writing other phys ed insights like who's your baseball glove

00:31

to block the sun aren't quite as useful unless you're

00:35

writing on a really really sunny day All right well

00:38

the active voice in the passive voice are two different

00:41

ways of constructing sentences They're also the only two ways

00:45

of constructing sentences Well that kind of restrictiveness might be

00:48

a nightmare for architects Imagine a world where you could

00:51

only construct skyscrapers or barn but these limits worked just

00:55

fine in the world Grammar senses in the active voice

00:58

followed this general structure where the subject performs the herbs

01:02

A good example of this form is a sentence like

01:05

the man read the newspaper the verbs reading might not

01:09

seem terribly active but we're focused on structure the subject's

01:12

definitely perf forming the verb who the object i reading

01:16

as a side note it's also much better use of

01:18

a newspaper than throwing it down the sewer You know

01:21

unless you happen to know a sewer technician down there

01:24

who's really bored I will on the other hand senses

01:26

in the passive voice follow this structure where the verb

01:30

is done to the subject If we took our sentence

01:33

in the active voice and changed it to the passive

01:36

voice it is now be the newspaper was read by

01:39

the man Well as you might notice when we switched

01:42

voices the newspaper got upgraded from object to subject and

01:45

the man demoted from subject to object We're sure he's

01:49

not super pumped about that even though there's nothing grammatically

01:52

wrong with using the passive voice When we compare the

01:55

two sentences we start to get a sense of why

01:57

the passive voice is so despised For one the passive

02:01

version is unnecessarily wordy and long about really clarifying anything

02:06

Those extra words don't help achieve anything unless you're trying

02:09

To make a tripping hazard and as we've noted the

02:12

change in voice also means a change in subject that

02:15

might help the newspaper self esteem But that shouldn't be

02:18

our primary concern when it comes to writing sentences with

02:21

shift in subjects has a sneaky consequence by using the

02:24

passive voice weaken sometimes even leave out the object that

02:27

was once the subject That might not seem so bad

02:30

when we're just talking about newspapers but think about sentences

02:33

like many protesters were injured Yes this makes it clear

02:37

that they were injured but who did it were guessing

02:40

they didn't just drop there signs on themselves Or maybe

02:43

they did protest gets weird sometimes Well that's head there

02:46

are circumstances when the passive voice is the way to

02:49

go For example damn museum was robbed but no one

02:52

knows who did it Well the passive voice lets us

02:54

say the museum was robbed without having to know who

02:57

did the robbing even though we're sure that cops would

02:59

like to know So with a few exceptions the active

03:01

voice is preferable to the passive It just is it's

03:04

preferable toe win marathons with your own two legs rather

03:07

Than any couch and car contraptions even if they allow 00:03:11.0 --> [endTime] you to eat way more chips from erica Yeah

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