voice

✍️ google-blog-style

Source: https://developers.google.com/style/voice\n\n# Active voice

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Save and categorize content based on your preferences.\n\n- Home\n- Products\n- Style\n\n\n## Page Summary\n\n- Prioritize using active voice to ensure clarity and directness in your writing, making it clear who is performing the action.\n- While active voice is generally preferred, passive voice can be acceptable in specific situations, such as when emphasizing the object, de-emphasizing the subject, or when the actor is irrelevant.\n- Passive voice can make it difficult for readers to understand who is responsible for an action, leading to confusion and ambiguity.\n- When using passive voice, ensure the context provides enough information for readers to understand the meaning, even without explicitly stating the actor.\n- Refer to Google's Technical Writing One guide for a deeper understanding of active and passive voice and their appropriate usage.\n\nPrioritize using active voice to ensure clarity and directness in your writing, making it clear who is performing the action.\n\nWhile active voice is generally preferred, passive voice can be acceptable in specific situations, such as when emphasizing the object, de-emphasizing the subject, or when the actor is irrelevant.\n\nPassive voice can make it difficult for readers to understand who is responsible for an action, leading to confusion and ambiguity.\n\nWhen using passive voice, ensure the context provides enough information for readers to understand the meaning, even without explicitly stating the actor.\n\nRefer to Google's Technical Writing One guide for a deeper understanding of active and passive voice and their appropriate usage.\n\nIn general, use active voice (in which the grammatical subject of the

sentence is the person or thing performing the action) instead of passive voice

(in which the grammatical subject of the sentence is the person or thing being

acted upon), although there are exceptions. Make clear who's performing the

action.\n\nIn passive voice, it's easy to neglect to indicate who

or what is performing a particular action. In this kind of construction, it's

often hard for readers to figure out who's supposed to do something (such as the

reader, the computer, the server, an end user, or a visitor to a web page).\n\nRecommended: Send a query to the service.

The server sends an acknowledgment.\n\nNot recommended: The service is queried,

and an acknowledgment is sent.\n\nIt's possible to indicate who's performing the action in passive voice (using

by), but the resulting prose is generally not as good as if you were to recast

the sentence as active voice. So whenever possible, make the doer the subject of

the sentence.\n\nRecommended: Send a query to the service.

The server sends an acknowledgment.\n\nNot recommended: The service is queried by

you, and an acknowledgment is sent by the server.\n\nFor more information, see

Active voice vs. passive voice

in Google's Technical Writing One guide.\n\n\n## Exceptions\n\nIn certain cases, it's okay to use passive voice. For example, passive can be

okay in the following instances:\n\n- To emphasize an object over an action.\n- To de-emphasize a subject or actor.\n- If your readers don't need to know who's responsible for the action.\n\nRecommended: The file is saved.\n\nRecommended: Over 50 conflicts were

found in the file.\n\nNot recommended: You created over 50

conflicts in the file.\n\nRecommended: The database was purged

in January.\n