The Active and Passive Voice

[tinkerdan]

Well done. Not often are there given good examples of great passive sentences.

T
he dog was being walked, slowly and distractedly, by Jane.

In my mind gives you more than,

Jane walked the dog slowly and distractedly.

If a picture paints a thousand words then it probably take a few extra to describe the picture.

Jane walked the dog slowly and distractedly.[Is someone describing what they saw.]

The dog was being walked, slowly and distractedly, by Jane.[Is someone painting the picture.]

 

[RX-79G]

A natural voice and dialect it shouldn't be totally ignored in favour of Americans and Londoners (although London has its own dialect )

I didn't say you should, I said:

I suppose the answer to that is; if your character isn't a Scouse speaker, then you're going to have to do some acting when you're reading aloud. If you are writing for a London or New York audience, you'll have to become one of them when you write.

Meaning, if you don't want your character to sound like they have a dialect different then yours, then you'll have to find a way to make them sound like they don't have your dialect. But if they do use your dialect, then carry on.

I appreciate it's hard for an American to grasp the diversity of dialects in the UK.

It really isn't. Your dialects have the been the subject of enough films that we get it. But I imagine that RP or something like it is the equivalent of US Midwest accent in being the default "Standard English" for use in the settings where a regional flavor is not desired.

We don't have dialects for the most part, but we do have accents that someone with a good ear can use to place people at least within a region. As a Midwesterner, I might not be able to tell the difference between a Mississippi and Alabama accent, but I can tell that they aren't a Louisianan or Carolina accent. Other Americans might just clump them all together as "Southern" if they don't think about it. And when people from any of those regions get TV news jobs, they start talking like I do when on air.

 

[Kylara]

Takes a bow, why thank you

I'm a lover of passive and adverbs so use them an awful lot sadly lots of people don't like either haha. I love a good passivi sentence, I'd write a whole book in passive if I could get away with it. There's a beautiful melancholy one can create with the passive.