Terrifying Sentences, Active Voice and a Good Giggle

Alright, is it just me or did chapter 4 make sentences just a little more terrifying? I mean, I can usually spot a bad sentence when I see one, but I have never stopped to look at sentence structure in such depth! To be honest, it’s a little overwhelming. Trying to define the terms in the verbs assignment seemed like a daunting task as well.

The most important thing I learned this week how to differentiate between passive and active voice. Professors often comment about using active voice instead of passive voice in essay and article assignments. Until now, it was unclear what that meant. In a passive voice sentence, the person performing an action becomes the object of the sentence and is acted upon. Even the definition sounds wishy-washy. In active voice sentences the subject performs the action. Now that I know the difference between the two I will be sure to use active voice more often.

I was unable to find an editing problem that related to this week’s discussion. My editing encounter for the week deals with a conversation I had with my dad and closely relates to last week’s topic of poor grammar and spelling. My dad, bless his heart, is most definitely not a proficient text writer, though he does try for the sake of convenience. When he is in a hurry he’ll use fewer key strokes and it ends up looking like this: “Cool- Jess is IN! 12 works best 4 her. That time ok with YOU? THEN DONE!” When he has a little more time and he’ll use a few too many letters. He sent this in his excitement about our lunch date: “Saaaaaaweeeeet!” Though good grammar is obviously important, his texts do give me a good giggle.