Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages.
Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the agent of the main verb. That is, the subject does the action designated by the verb. A sentence whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active sentence. In contrast, a sentence in which the subject has the role of patient or theme is called a passive sentence, and its verb is expressed in passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.
Read more about Active Voice: Examples
Famous quotes containing the words active voice, active and/or voice:
“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice—that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.””
—Sydney J. Harris (b. 1917)
“Things happen to us, all the time. It was like that for a century, and it is again. It’s not like here: People always do things, because you are born with it; you are brought up in this spirit, the active approach to life: “Stand up and go.” We were not. We were always passive in our lives.”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)
“Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice distracts us and misleads us into making assertions that in no way express our true opinions.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)