engrprof:

runecestershire:

engrprof:

erwica:

engrprof:

alluringalliteration:

OH my GOd a thesis statement is just a paper’s tl;dr sentence. I feel like I just solved a mystery, this is amazing. ConTExT Is AMAzinG!!!

This is on a level with the passive-voice zombie check!
Awesome!

What is the passive-voice zombie check?

If you can add “by zombies” to a sentence and it makes sense, it’s passive voice.
For example, “Mistakes were made” (common politician statement) works just fine as “Mistakes were made by zombies” so it’s passive voice.
“I made a mistake by zombies”, on the other hand, doesn’t work because it’s active voice.

The thing about the zombie check is that it sorts out the actual passives from the sentences that provide less nouns but are still active. eg “the bus exploded” is an active sentence, the bus is the subject of the sentence. Trying to add zombies (”the bus exploded by zombies”) doesn’t work – it would mean that zombies were near, not that they caused the explosion, and it’d change the sentence instead of just adding more information – you’d have to change the original sentence to make the zombies the cause (“the bus was exploded by zombies”).

P.S. The passive voice is not as wrong as you may have been told, go ahead and use it sometimes.

Yes, not trying to imply that passive voice is always wrong. But it’s helpful for students to be able to identify it so they can use it knowingly.
One good reason is to change the emphasis of the sentence or capture the audience’s attention. For example, if the president is shot by someone no one has ever heard of, leading with the shooter’s name tends to lull people into tuning out. So go ahead and say, “The president was shot today by [random person].”