A sentence is in the  passive  voice  when  its	 grammatical
subject	 is the	receiver of the	action.

     PASSIVE: The ball was hit by the boy.

When the doer of the action in a sentence  is  the  subject,
the sentence is	in the active voice.

     ACTIVE: The boy hit the ball.

The passive voice is sometimes needed

  1.  to emphasize the object of the sentence,

  2.  to vary the rhythm of the	text, or

  3.  to avoid naming an unimportant actor.

     EXAMPLE: The appropriations were approved.

     Although  passive	sentences  are	 sometimes   needed,
psychological  research	 has  shown  that they are harder to
comprehend than	 active	 sentences.   Because  of  this	 you
should	transform  as  many  of	 your passives to actives as
possible.  You can use the _s_t_y_l_e program to  find  all	your
sentences   with  passive  verbs  in  them,  by	 typing	 the
following command when this program is finished.

		     style -p filename
