The active voice is more direct and conveys meaning more clearly than the passive. This is because the subject directly performs the action, and it requires fewer words to express that idea.
However, there are times when passive voice can be useful. To avoid misuse, it’s important to know the difference between active and passive voice and when you can use them.
Subject-Verb Agreement
Regardless of whether you are writing in active or passive voice, subject-verb agreement is crucial. This is because it enables your reader to understand who or what is doing something.
Subjects are the people, places, or things that perform an action. They must be accompanied by verbs that describe that action.
In English, there is a lot of subject-verb agreement, which matches the verb describing the subject in tense, aspect, and mood (TAM). These grammatical aspects of a sentence match in number.
Grammarly suggests using singular verbs for singular subjects and plural verbs for plural subjects. It also recommends that you check your subject-verb agreement before editing your work.
The most common mistakes include combining indefinite pronouns such as anyone, everybody, everyone, nobody, no one, and someone with verbs that are plural. It’s also a common mistake to combine collective nouns such as group, jury, crowd, team, and herd with a plural verb.
Object-Verb Agreement
Object-verb agreement is the agreement between the verb and the subject of a sentence. It can be tricky, but it is important to understand.
In English, verbs agree in person and number with their subjects (the person or group of persons that do the action they describe) and in gender with their objects. Similarly, articles and adjectives agree in case and number with the nouns they modify.
For example, when describing something with a number, such as a number of books or an amount of money, use a singular verb.
However, when the subject is a collective noun, such as a team or family, or when it is a unit of measurement, such as a cup of coffee, use a plural verb. This is because collective nouns are treated as singular nouns in American English.
Object-Object Agreement
In English, the word ‘object’ refers to an element of the sentence that is acted on by the verb. This can be a noun, a noun phrase or a longer complex object.
Object-verb agreement is not quite as well known as subject-verb disagreement, but it’s a tricky grammatical conundrum that can crop up in both formal and informal writing. Grammarly provides a resource on this topic that should help you avoid the most common of blunders, like “Jenny and her friends” or “Jenny and her sisters.”
Object-verb agreement is often accompanied by other more minor grammatical errors, such as verb tense and case marking. Bock and Miller found that a direct-object noun phrase exerts an “attraction effect” on agreement. This is because the verb and a direct object noun have a grammatical relationship similar to that of a subject and a subject head noun.
Object-Subject Agreement
Object-Subject Agreement is the difference between a verb that is performing an action (active) and one that is receiving an action (passive). Active voice emphasizes the doer of the action while passive voice highlights the receiver of the action.
To get a better understanding of object-subject agreement, it helps to think about the basic sentence construction: subject, verb, and object.
The subject is the noun performing the action indicated by the verb. The object is the noun receiving the action.
In English, subjects and verbs always agree in number and tense. Unlike nouns, which cannot denote tense, subjects must be in the correct tense when used within the same clause or sentence.
However, some sentences may be incorrectly formed in passive voice when the author is trying to convey a sense of continuity or permanence. If the writer is using an auxiliary verb like was or will have been, it’s best to stick with active voice.