The Importance of Active vs. Passive Voice in Protest Coverage

Joshua Adams
5 min readMay 31, 2020

I wanted to use the two tweets from NYT to explain active versus passive voice and why it matters in news coverage (particularly when covering charged topics at the moment).

A sentence typically has a clear subject and verb. When you write a sentence, you can write in active or passive voice. Active voice is subject then verb. An example is “I fixed the…

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Joshua Adams

Joshua Adams is a writer from Chicago. UVA & USC. Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago. Twitter: @ProfJoshuaA