As a writing teacher as well as a grammar teacher, I'd like to raise the larger question: Should we be training students to think passives are automatically bad and always to be avoided?

Since my last verb phrase in the previous sentence is passive (just like Herb's last verb phrase in his message below) it's clear that my answer is no. Often a passive construction is exactly what a writer wants to use in a given context. In our classrooms we can compare active and passive sentences and discuss the impact of each, guiding students to see when passives are less effective than active sentences and when they are more effective.

Dick Veit
UNCW English Department
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 10:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Recognition of passives

At least we’re talking about teachers who know what a passive is.  I have found repeatedly that teachers who mark something in a composition as passive don’t know what a passive is themselves and have incorrectly marked the offending sentence.  Often the presence of a “be” verb is enough for a teacher to call the sentence passive.  But I’ve seen pairs like the following treated as active and passive respectively:

Jack gave Marie a ring.
Marie received a ring from Jack.

In the second sentence, Marie is Patient, not Agent, and passive subjects are also typically patients, so any sentence with a Patient as subject is called passive and marked wrong, as well as wrongly.

Herb

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