Explore
For Enterprise
Join for Free
Log In

艺术与人文
商务
计算机科学
数据科学
信息技术
健康
数学和逻辑
个人发展
物理科学与工程
社会科学
语言学习
学位
证书

浏览 Coursera 的全部课程

浏览
搜索
企业版
登录
免费加入

Active and Passive Voice

Loading...

英语写作 I

4.6（369 个评分） | 150K 名学生已注册

You will gain a foundation for college-level writing valuable for nearly any field. Students will learn how to read carefully, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, engage with others' ideas, cite accurately, and craft powerful prose. Course Learning Objectives • Summarize, analyze, question, and evaluate written and visual texts • Argue and support a position • Recognize audience and disciplinary expectations • Identify and use the stages of the writing process • Identify characteristics of effective prose • Apply proper citation practices • Discuss applying your writing knowledge to other writing occasions

查看授课大纲

您将学习的技能

Essay Writing, English Language, Academic Writing, Editing

审阅

4.6（369 个评分）

5 stars
271 ratings
4 stars
67 ratings
3 stars
14 ratings
2 stars
4 ratings
1 star
13 ratings

LB

Jun 21, 2018

Helpful, informative, and engaging! I've always been at the top of my classes in English, but this is helping me sharpen my skills even more and apply them to my life.

PB

Apr 01, 2018

Hard work and worth it! Grateful for the opportunity. Fully recommend it for anyone who is serious about learning to write clearly and improve their prose.

从本节课中

Project 3: Op-Ed

This week, Professor Comer introduces the idea of public scholarship, how academic writing can be transformed for a broader public. Her guest, David Jarmul, will give an overview of how to write an op-ed. You will then have the opportunity to write your own.

Active and Passive Voice6:14

Enhancing Sentence Style8:23

Op-Ed Writing Workshop43:03

教学方

Dr. Denise Comer
Assistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing

脚本

Hello, today we're thinking about active and passive voice.

I'll define what it is, offer you a few examples, and we'll think about how to

make choices about when to use active voice and when to use passive voice.

This marks a contrast to the way that I was taught about active and passive voice

as someone working within the field of English when it was taught to me.

It was described as that which I should always strive for active voice in my

writing and passive voice was wordy and inappropriate and clumsy.

And I should kind of rigorously delete every example of passive voice in

all of my writing.

This is not what I'm sharing with you.

[LAUGH] This is not what I want you to take away from this.

I really want you to take away from this video that active and

passive voice is another kind of choice that you make as a writer.

And you want to think about disciplinary context,

as well as primarily what you're trying to communicate in your writing.

Whether you choice active voice or

passive voice depends on what you're trying to say.

So let's take a look at a few examples.

Active voice and passive voice has to do with emphasis.

It's where the action is happening in a particular sentence.

Here is an example.

The most influential op-ed in 2013 was written by Mueller.

And in this example the emphasis is on the most influential op-ed.

That's where, as a reader what you focus on.

So here, Mueller takes kind of secondary importance, right?

As a reader, what I'm getting from this is that I should be focusing on

the influential op-ed maybe in 2013 but

Mueller is sort of like a subsidiary level of focus.

By contrast in the second sentence,

Mueller wrote the most influential op-ed in 2013.

Here, the emphasis is clearly as a reader, on Mueller, right?

I'm focusing on Mueller's accomplishment.

And here, this influential op-ed now has kind of secondary importance.

So I can't say to you necessarily which version is better or

prefered because these are out of context,

I don't know what the purpose was of communicating this.

So if this is coming in a letter of recommendation

or an award of achievement that Mueller is getting,

then probably we want to frame it in that way, right?

because it's about Mueller and it's about her accomplishment.

However, if this is more focusing on the nature of op-eds and op-eds ofinfluence.

Maybe this would be the way that we would go.

So disciplinary context plays a really key role here too,

in addition to the emphasis.

There are certain disciplines where passive voice is much more

kind of standard.

So the sciences and to a certain degree, the social sciences,

you'll find passive voice much more in those disciplines and by in large,

in the humanities, you'll probably find more instances of active voice.

So, let's continue to think about how you'd make choices.

Here's an example of active voice, Atkin argues that graphic

representations help shape our understanding of ideas.

And in this example, the emphasis is on Atkin arguing and

what she's arguing about graphic representations.

By contrast, a passive version of that sentence would have placed

the emphasis elsewhere in a sentence.

So here, it was argued by Atkin that graphic representations help

shape our understanding of ideas.

And here, the emphasis is actually not even on graphic representations.

It's actually on it is the emphasis.

In this case, I think it's pretty safe to say [LAUGH] that

somebody would want to probably prefer this version to the passive voice

version because it's putting the action where it belongs.

Right, that Atkin is making this argument and this is what graphic representations,

why they're important as opposed to kind of relegating it to an it, right?

Which often it,

is not what you want to emphasize in a particular piece of writing.

So let's look at one more example where we can think about maybe,

where a writer would make a different choice.

Here's an active voice version of a sentence.

Atkin, Comer, Erol, Font, Vidra, 18 graduate students, and

12 undergraduates all from Duke conducted the study.

Okay, as with the sentence on the last slide, it certainly is kind of

attributing action to where the action was right, with all these people.

This is a lot of people and as a reader,

I'm not sure do I need to know all of this.

What I do need to know maybe is what's conveyed in the passive voice.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers from Duke and

this emphasizes the study itself which is probably what's important here.

So often with the sciences it's not so important who mixed the chemicals for

a certain experiment so much as that the chemicals were mixed, right?

That's what's important about the methodology and so

in the sciences especially, it's often more appropriate to use passive voice.

But, again I want to emphasize active voice, passive voice,

is about making choices.

A way that you can identify when active voice or passive voice are happening.

Often with passive voice, if you look for

forms of the word to be, was,

is a clear indicator that a passive voice is happening, not every time but often.

So if you want to look through and find moments in your writing where you're using

was and if it is a passive voice instance,

then you can make choices about whether you want to revise that to be active or

whether you want to keep it in the passive voice.

探索我们的目录

免费加入并获得个性化推荐、更新和优惠。

Coursera 致力于普及全世界最好的教育，它与全球一流大学和机构合作提供在线课程。

© 2019 Coursera Inc. 保留所有权利。

通过 App Store 下载

通过 Google Play 获取

Coursera
关于
管理团队
工作机会
目录
证书
MasterTrack™ 证书
学位
企业版
政府版

社区
Learners
Partners
Developers
Beta Testers
Translators

连接
博客
Facebook
领英
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
技术博客

更多
条款
隐私
帮助
内容访问
媒体
联系我们
目录
附属公司