Materials: Guidelines

Read through the example sentences and explanations with the class and make sure that people understand when and when not to use the passive voice. If you need a further example, you might try this one that managed to catch the imaginations of some of my groups:

• Some lightning struck our teacher.

• Our teacher was struck by lightning

After, the explanation instruct students to read through the active voice sentences 1 - 10, identifying the subject and object in each case and deciding if passive voice would be better in each case. To add a discursive element ot the class, I generally ask my classes to compare results but you may want to skip this.

In my opinion, the sentences that should be changed are 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, and maybe 6. Of particular interest, are snetences 7 (where computers are more important than office workers) and sentence 8 (which native speakers would almost certainly say in active voice as "some people" have a more significant meaning in this sentence than the tools they are using).

You have a choice of two different methods of getting this handout to your printer. It all depends on whether your computer has "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed. If it has, then this would be the recommended method for printing out the worksheet. Try selecting the "PDF (Adobe Acrobat)" link below. If all goes well, a new application window should appear including a print button, which when selected will print out one copy.

If, on the other hand you do not have "Adobe Acrobat" select the "HTML (web page)" link below. (Also, this method is recommended for users of Netscape Navigator, which seems to have trouble interacting with the Acrobat program like this.) If all goes well, a new browser window will open, from which you can either click the "print button" on the toolbar or open the "File" menu, select "Print" and then adjust the "Print Dialog Box" to your own preferences.

If you are using Internet Explorer and want the grey background in the examples to show up, you will need to enable the printing of background colours. To do this select "Tools", then "Internet Options", then choose the "Advanced Tab" of the dialogue box. Then scroll down the choices to "Printing" and click in the box to "check" it. Then click OK and print your handout. It's a very good idea to reverse this setting immediately after printing.

The final link below is to enable you to print this "instruction page" if you want to. Click on the link, and when the page appears on a new screen you will be able to print it using the browser's "print button" or "file menu". After printing, close the window again so that you can continue to navigate around the site.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.