Relax! Comment Moderation is Enabled

Your comments won't show immediately because I have to approve them first.

By the way, do you recognize the passive voice sentence in the blog entry title?

Comment moderation is enabled.

Even though "voice" is a verb characteristic, in a passive voice sentence,it is the subject of the sentence that is really "passive," or inactive.

Who enabled the comment moderation? The title of the blog gives us no clue, but you know that Mr. Fiorelli is the man behind the curtain.

The title could read "Comment moderation is enabled by Mr. Fiorelli." The "by Mr. Fiorelli" is either not important or understood, so it's left out. In this case, passive voice is completely acceptable. All you need to know is that "comment moderation is enabled."

A passive voice verb can be recognized (hmm, more passive lurking in this sentence) by the combination of a form of "to be" plus the past participle.

"Is" is a form of "be." "Enabled" is the past participle of the verb, to enable.

Passive voice is often found (double hmm) on the SAT writing section as an example of poor writing STYLE. On the SAT, given a choice, always choose passive voice as an error. However, passive voice is NOT a grammatical error. Passive voice de-emphasizes the subject performing the action and places emphasis on the direct object, the receiver of the action, not always a good thing.

For instance, in the sentence, "The Nobel Peace Prize for Literature was won by the gifted author John Fiorelli for his blog, Schoolsville," the passive voice emphasizes the "prize,"but NOT the gifted author. A better sentence would be the active voice, "The gifted author John Fiorelli won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature for his blog, Schoolsville." In this sentence, the subject, John Fiorelli, is active. HE won the award. Let's give him proper recognition (AKA "props").

The bunny in the political cartoon used passive voice (he's saying "Mistakes were made") since he didn't want to reveal the agent who made the mistakes, though it's clearly obvious that he is the culprit. Ah, politicians and their slimy use of rhetoric to conceal the truth. Try this at home. "No, mom, my room was not cleaned" or "No, Dad, the trash was not taken out."

Still can't recognize passive voice? Well, there's a mini-lesson coming to your class real soon. Meanwhile, copy and paste the contents of this post into a word document and grammar check the document. At least three sentences (make that four now) should be recognized as passive voice sentences.