MODULE

Business English

LOGISTICS

Faculty Study Program Session Course code Lecturer

14
Economy and Accounting F041700028 Mudrika Anisahri, SS, M.Pd
Business

Abstract Competency
This unit explains about logistics in Students are able to
business understand about logistics in
business
Unit 14: Logistics

READING COMPREHENSION

VOCABULARY

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GRAMMAR

PASSIVE VOICE

What is the passive voice?

In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it,
more active. The subject is something, or it does the action of the verb in the sentence. With
the passive voice, the subject is acted upon by some other performer of the verb. (In case
you weren’t paying attention, the previous two sentences use the type of voice they
describe.)

But the passive voice is not incorrect. In fact, there are times when it can come in handy.
Read on to learn how to form the active and passive voices, when using the passive voice is
a good idea, and how to avoid confusing it with similar forms.
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The difference between active and passive voice

While tense is all about time references, voice describes whether the grammatical subject of
a clause performs or receives the action of the verb. Here’s the formula for the active voice:
[subject]+[verb (performed by the subject)]+[optional object]

Chester kicked the ball.

In a passive voice construction, the grammatical subject of the clause receives the action of
the verb. So, the ball from the above sentence, which is receiving the action, becomes the
subject. The formula: [subject]+[some form of the verb to be]+[past participle of a transitive
verb]+[optional prepositional phrase]

The ball was kicked by Chester.

That last little bit—“by Chester”—is a prepositional phrase that tells you who the performer of
the action is. But even though Chester is the one doing the kicking, he’s no longer the
grammatical subject. A passive voice construction can even drop him from the sentence
entirely:

The ball was kicked.

How’s that for anticlimactic?

When (and when not) to use the passive voice

If you’re writing anything with a definitive subject who’s performing an action, you’ll be better
off using the active voice. And if you search your document for instances of was,
is, or were and your page lights up with instances of passive voice, it may be a good idea to
switch to active voice.

That said, there are times when the passive voice does a better job of presenting an idea,
especially in certain formal, professional, and legal discussions. Here are three common
uses of the passive voice:

1 Reports of crimes or incidents with unknown perpetrators

My car was stolen yesterday.

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If you knew who stole the car, it probably wouldn’t be as big a problem. The passive voice
emphasizes the stolen item and the action of theft.

2 Scientific contexts

The rat was placed into a T-shaped maze.

Who places the rat into the maze? Scientists, duh. But that’s less important than the
experiment they’re conducting. Therefore, passive voice.

3 When you want to emphasize an action itself and the doer of the action is irrelevant or
distracting:

The president was sworn in on a cold January morning.

How many people can remember off the top of their heads who swears in presidents?
Clearly the occasion of swearing in the commander in chief is the thing to emphasize here.
In each of the above contexts, the action itself—or the person or thing receiving the action—
is the part that matters. That means the performer of the action can appear in a prepositional
phrase or be absent from the sentence altogether.

Creative ways to use the passive voice in writing

The above examples show some formal uses of the passive voice, but some writers take
advantage of the shift in emphasis it provides for other reasons. Here are moments when the
passive voice is a stylistic decision that suits the author’s writing goals. 1 Avoid getting
blamed There are times when you want to get away with something without making it
crystal-clear who’s at fault. The classic example:

“Mistakes were made.” —most politicians

Who made them? Is anyone taking responsibility? What’s the solution here? One political
scientist dubbed this structure the “past exonerative” because it’s meant to exonerate a
speaker from whatever foul they may have committed. In other words, drop the subject, get
off the hook.

2 Beat around the bush

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Jane Austen is a master of poking fun at her characters so euphemistically that it seems
almost polite, and the passive voice is one of her favorite methods for doing that.

“[He] pressed them so cordially to dine at Barton Park every day till they were better settled
at home that, though his entreaties were carried to a point of perseverance beyond civility,
they could not give offense.” —Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Austen could have rephrased this sentence like so:

“Though Mr. Middleton carried his entreaties to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they
could not give offense.”

Though maybe she means something closer to:

“Mr. Middleton pushed his invitations beyond the point of politeness and into pushiness, but
he still meant well.”

In cases like this, the passive voice allows for more polite phrasing, even if it’s also a little
less clear.

3 Make your reader pay more attention to the something

This is like the president getting sworn in: the thing that gets the action of the verb is more
important than the people performing the action.

“That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floating sideways
on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Here, you could invert the sentence to say “Historians evoked that treasure (and so on).” But
that would take the focus away from that oh-so-intriguing treasure and the corpse. And since
the historians are less important here, the author makes the choice to stress the key idea of
the sentence through the passive voice.

Here’s another famous example that puts the emphasis on what happens to the subject,
instead of on what the subject is doing:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Declaration of Independence, 1776
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“All men” (and these days, women, too) get boosted to the front of the phrase because their
equality and rights are the focus. It makes sense that a statement declaring independence
would focus on the people who get that independence, after all.

So writers use it. Can you?

The above examples lean toward the literary side of things, but don’t forget that there are
times when the passive voice is useful and necessary in daily life. In each of the sentences
below, the passive voice is natural and clear. Rewriting these sentences in the active voice
renders them sterile, awkward, or syntactically contorted. Passive: Bob Dylan was injured in
a motorcycle accident. Active: A motorcycle accident injured Bob Dylan. Passive: Elvis is
rumored to be alive. Active: People rumor Elvis to be alive. Passive: Don’t be
fooled! Active: Don’t allow anything to fool you!

Passive voice misuse

Sometimes what looks like passive voice isn’t passive voice at all. If you’re not careful, even
the most careful eye can mistake the following sentences for passive voice.

Chester’s favorite activity is kicking. The bank robbery took place just before closing time.
There is nothing we can do about it. There were a great number of dead leaves covering the
ground.

Despite what any well-meaning English teachers may have told you, none of the sentences
above are written in the passive voice. The sentence about the leaves, in fact, was (wrongly)
presented as an example of the passive voice by none other than Strunk and White in The
Elements of Style. Here’s how to remember: using the verb to be doesn’t automatically put a
verb phrase into the passive voice. You also need a past participle. That’s how to keep
passive voice masqueraders from fooling you.

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Use Grammarly to catch the passive voice

Grammarly catches instances of passive voice in your writing so you know when you need to
switch it up. For example, when writing this, Grammarly pointed out that the first phrase was,
in fact, written in passive voice. We ignored it, of course, for style reasons.

The gist is summed up here:

 The passive voice isn’t a grammatical error; it’s a matter of style

 Use the active voice if it makes your sentence sound clearer and more natural

 Forming passive voice requires the verb “to be” and a past participle

 The passive voice is your friend when the thing receiving an action is the important part
of the sentence—especially in scientific and legal contexts, times when the performer
of an action is unknown, or cases where the subject is distracting or irrelevant

 When it comes to good writing, don’t be passive—even if your sentences sometimes

need to be

 Use Grammarly to help you find instances of passive voice

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References

Books:
Cotton, David et al., 2012. Market Leader. United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Trappe, Tonya, & Tullis, Graham., 2005. Intelligent Business Course Book. United Kingdom:
Pearson Education Limited.

Websites:
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/passive-voice/

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