The Active Voice: Samantha Irby will make you rethink your toilet
words are actions. They punch, tear, hurt, harm, soothe, amuse, educate, illuminate. They express ideas and feelings, and they make people feel better, and they move them to tears, and they enrage them, and they define them. We are all made of nouns, live by verbs, enlarge and entertain ourselves with adjectives and adverbs.
Anna Quindlen • Write for Your Life
This sentence is in the passive voice: “The car was driven by Jim.” You can tell because the subject (Jim) is at the end, which shifts the focus of the sentence to its object (the car). This sentence is in the active voice: “Jim drove the car.” You can tell because Jim, the subject, is doing the action.
Eddie Shleyner • Very Good Copy: 207 Micro-Lessons on Thinking and Writing Like a Copywriter
Voice isn’t only about what you sound like and what you say; it’s also about how you deliver it. As Rebecca Solnit describes it, a writer’s voice is “something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for.”