2.3- Active voice practice

In this next module, we’re going to practice use of the active voice. I’m going to put up a passive voice sentence and then I’ll have you pause the video and attempt to put it back into the active voice on your own. Then you can restart the video and I’ll go over the answer. We’re going to start with this sentence, a recommendation was made by the DSMB committee that the study be halted. Now pause the video and turn that into the active voice and then restart the video. Hopefully, you came up with something similar to what I did. To put this in the active voice, you say, okay, who made the recommendation? Well, it was the DSMB committee that recommended that the study be halted. So to put this in the active voice, we put the agent first. The DSMB committee goes first. The DSMB committee recommended that the study be halted. The next example says, major differences in the reaction times of the two study subjects were found. Now, go ahead and pause the video and turn that into the active voice. Hopefully, you’ve got a similar answer to mine. To turn that one into the active voice you had to recognize that there actually wasn’t an agent in that sentence I gave you. So you had to guess that the agent is probably the authors of a scientific manuscript, who are reporting this result. So you can say, we observed, or the scientist observed, or the researchers observed, major differences in the reaction times of the two study subjects. If you want to, perhaps we don’t need the we observed here at all actually. You could be more direct and just state what was observed. So you could say, the two study subjects differed in reaction times. The next example says, it was concluded by the editors that the data had been falsified by the authors. Go ahead now and pause the video, and make this one into the active voice. Hopefully in that sentence, you noticed that they were two passive verbs that you had to make active. It was concluded and the data have been falsified. Both of those are passive verbs. So turn this all back to the active voice you have to think about who did the concluding, that’s the editors, and who did the falsifying, that’s the authors. So to turn this back to the active voice, you would say the editors concluded that the authors falsified their data. The next example says the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star has been taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. So go ahead and pause the video and turn that into the active voice. To turn this one into the active voice, you had to recognize who or what was taking the snapshots. That’s the telescope, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, that’s the agent. What was being taken? Well, the first snapshot of the planet. So we’re going to turn this one back into the active voice by saying, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. Hopefully, you got something similar. Here’s the final practice exercise. This one is a bit challenging. It reads, therefore, the hypothesis that the overall kinetics of a double transtibial amputee athlete and an able-bodied sprinter at the same level of performance are not different, was rejected. There are actually several things you can do to edit this sentence, but at least go ahead and pause the video and turn this into the active voice. Hopefully, you got a similar answer to mine. To turn this into the active voice you had to recognize that the passive verb is, was rejected. Which came way at the end of the sentence. Again, there was no agent, but we can assume it’s the authors of the paper who rejected the hypothesis. So you can say we rejected the hypothesis that the overall kinetics of a double transtibial amputee athlete and an able-bodied sprinter at the same level of performance are comparable. Now the original said that they were not different, but I changed this into a positive construction. Instead of are not different, I said, are comparable. Remember that turning negative constructions into positives is another trick we learned last week, for making sentences more readable.