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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.
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
Full Transcript
- 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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