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No Well even if he only paid the slightest amount

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of attention and is ed you probably know that being

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

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by sitting on the couch and if you are winning

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marathons by sitting on your couch is probably being pulled

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by a car or something which is kind of ingenious

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might give that a shot at the olympics but believe

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it or not this insight about the active being better

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than the passive has direct applications when it comes to

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

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

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writing on a really really sunny day All right well

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the active voice in the passive voice are two different

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

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of constructing sentences Well that kind of restrictiveness might be

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a nightmare for architects Imagine a world where you could

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only construct skyscrapers or barn but these limits worked just

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fine in the world Grammar senses in the active voice

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followed this general structure where the subject performs the herbs

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A good example of this form is a sentence like

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the man read the newspaper the verbs reading might not

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

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definitely perf forming the verb who the object i reading

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

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a newspaper than throwing it down the sewer You know

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unless you happen to know a sewer technician down there

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

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in the passive voice follow this structure where the verb

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is done to the subject If we took our sentence

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in the active voice and changed it to the passive

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voice it is now be the newspaper was read by

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the man Well as you might notice when we switched

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voices the newspaper got upgraded from object to subject and

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

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

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wrong with using the passive voice When we compare the

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two sentences we start to get a sense of why

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the passive voice is so despised For one the passive

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version is unnecessarily wordy and long about really clarifying anything

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

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

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change in voice also means a change in subject that

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

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our primary concern when it comes to writing sentences with

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shift in subjects has a sneaky consequence by using the

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passive voice weaken sometimes even leave out the object that

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was once the subject That might not seem so bad

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

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like many protesters were injured Yes this makes it clear

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that they were injured but who did it were guessing

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

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

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are circumstances when the passive voice is the way to

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go For example damn museum was robbed but no one

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knows who did it Well the passive voice lets us

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say the museum was robbed without having to know who

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

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like to know So with a few exceptions the active

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

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preferable toe win marathons with your own two legs rather

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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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