Varsity Tutors Using Passive Voice
Varsity Tutors Using Passive Voice sets out a nine-section lesson for advanced ESL learners on choosing the passive in workplace and academic writing. Varsity Tutors is a tutoring company, and this lesson is part of the practice library on its site. It covers the form across tenses, six reasons to choose the passive, a workplace email revised step by step, and five practice problems.
100% Free (unlimited): All nine sections open on the page without an account, among them the tense table, the chart of how often the passive appears by genre, the worked email revision and the five practice problems with their model answers. The company sells tutoring and the page links to it, but no part of the lesson is held back from a visitor who signs up for nothing.
How It Helps Your Business English
The lesson moves from the history of advice about the passive to five core principles, a diagram of the change from active to passive, the form in six tense and modal patterns, a chart of how often the passive appears by genre, a workplace email revised in four steps, a table of strengths and pitfalls, advanced constructions, and five practice problems.
Use the genre chart to judge how much passive belongs in what you are writing, from a lab report to a short email. Follow the four steps of the email revision to see how one topic is kept in the subject position across sentences. Then work the five problems, which ask you to rewrite a consulting paragraph and to weigh when leaving the doer out hides responsibility.
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