What do voices mean?
On a general note the voice can either be active or passive but has further divisions too. Active voice is used when the person or the subject of the sentence is the doer of the action. Giving an example; the baby ate a papaya. In this sentence, ‘baby’ is the subject and the action ‘eating’. On the other hand, in passive voice, the subject undergoes an action. This can be best shown with the same example; the papaya was eaten by the baby. In this sentence, the subject ‘baby’ undergoes the action of ‘eating’ a papaya.
While the active and passive voices are just reformation of the sentence in different forms, the person who delivers the message or the person to whom the message is delivered play a huge role in how that sentence is formed, particularly when one is writing a book or a short story.
If one is writing a book in which a narrator is presenting, then it should be written in the first person as he/she is describing what the narrator saw. Giving an example, if the writer witnessed a horrible train accident, the sentence formation would be like, “I saw people who were injured and dead”. If the writer is directly communicating with the reader, taking an example of self-help books, the reader must what the writer is willing to convey. The writer should thus make use of sentence in the second person and write it like, “If you ever witness an accident, this is what you should do…” This helps in having a clear focus on the reader as the reader understands that he too is an active part of what he/she is reading. Lastly, the writer must make use of the third person when he is describing the incidents which took place in the life of a character in his book. The sentence formation would be like, “They were employed to run the company”.
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