Screamer Wiki talk:Manual of Style

Active and passive voice.

Something feels out of place with the section of the manual that covers this. As it stands, it proposes these two sentences as respective examples of an "active" voice and a "passive" voice:

• Active Voice: "when the player clicks the button, a picture of Regan MacNeil appears"
• Passive Voice: "a picture of Regan MacNeil appears when the button was clicked by the player"

However, the passive example is the same sentence, but with its two parts switched around, and the verbal tense changing to past halfway through. While I can see how it could look like a passive sentence, it looks pretty confusing.

Unless I'm missing something, the difference between active and passive is in the structure, not in the order the info gets presented. If I get this right, in active, a given subject performs the action (denoted by the verb) on an object, such as "I write a sentence on the page". On the other hand, in passive, the object itself becomes the subject, and the performer of the action becomes completely optional to include, as in the case of "A sentence is written on the page" (where you can optionally say "by me" at the end).

So it'd be "I write a sentence on the page" in active, and "a sentence is written on the page (by me)" in passive.

Taken to the example mentioned in the manual,

• "When the player clicks the button, a picture of Regan MacNeil appears";
• "When the button is clicked, a picture of Regan MacNeil is shown"

Hope I got my point across. --Clener74 (talk) 15:15, 11 November 2020 (UTC)