Tips for Teaching Grammar

The Passive: Understanding the function of voice

Mastering a syntactic understanding of passive voice is difficult, but once they have mastered it, students still don't understand why they are often told not to write in the passive. I divide the class into groups of three or four, and I assign each group a sentence, e.g. "The hunter shot the bull," "The bull was shot by the hunter," or "The bull was shot." The task then is to write a short narrative that ends with the sentence assigned and that would not sound good if it ended with any other form of the sentence. We then read the narratives, try the other sentences out to see if they work, discuss what the students had to do to fit the narrative to the assigned sentence, and then talk about the role and function of voice in writing. The goal is for them to understand active and passive as options rather than as a preferred and a stigmatized form.

Herb Stahlke

Ball State University