Technical Writing, Coursework Example

Passive Voice Verbs to Active Voice Verbs

1. The computer programmer easily writes the programming language.
2. The pamphlet explains the instructions to install the garage door opener.
3. The employees at Citizen Bank performed the volunteer work with Habitat for humanity.
4. The Chief of Police reassigned dozens of police officers.
5. The French chef prepared the meal for celebrating Mardi Gras.
6. The hospital offers three major health benefits to its employees.

Combining the Sentences

• All drawings are either prospective or parallel projection.
• The operating tasks each company must perform are affected by many factors such as changes in market, new technology, and government regulations.
• Flat surfaces are measured with common tools such as steel ruler and the depth gauge where as round work is measured by feel with nonprecision tools such as the spring caliper and the firm-joint caliper.
• Born in 1787, German physicist George Simon Ohm discovered Ohm’s law which states that the current in an electrical circuit varies directly as the voltage and inversely as the resistance.
• None of the microbiologists was as accurate, honest, and sensible as Leeuwenhoek who died in 1723 at the age of 91.
• Work delegation by manager to a subordinate result in three actions being either performed or expressed which are assigning duty, granting authority, and creating an obligation.
• Made of thin sheet of lightweight alloy, vane is one essential part of an air damper box and is stiffened by stamping ribs into it as well as bending its edges in order to conform to the surfaces of the dampening chamber.
• Water from newly constructed wells will normally have a very high bacterial count that will not settle down for weeks or even months unless the water is treated to reduce the bacterial population that found its way into the water during the construction process.
• Texture serves as a valuable tool for landscaped architects because repetition of a dominant plant texture unifies a plan and contrast of texture at corner and focal points gives emphasis.
• Culture medium is any material employed to grow bacteria and to be satisfactory, it must have the proper moisture content, contain readily available food materials, and have the correct acid-base balance.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Sentences 1, 2, 3, and 6 are example of parallel sentences which are joined by coordinators. The advantages of such sentences are that they can be easily shortened with few coordinators because they follow the same pattern. The parallel parts had all the same grammatical structure and followed the same sentence object. The disadvantage is that this is not always possible as we see in sentence 6 where some of the sentence structure was changed to passive from an active form before the parallel sentences could be joined to form a single sentence.Sentences 4, 5, 7,and 8 had multiple subjects so we used adjective clauses. The advantage of this method is that we can describe two related subjects in the same sentence but the disadvantage is that there is a potential to get confused as to which subject is performing a certain action.

Sentences 9 and 10 were first changed to passive forms so that the parallel sentences describing their traits could be joined by coordinators. The advantage was that we were able to show a link between the subject and its traits without confusing the reader. The problem in all of the above sentences was that sometimes they got too long and too much information in a single sentence can make it hard for the reader to retain information. In addition, it is often possible to join sentences in multiple ways so how a sentence is joined also depends upon the preferences of the writer.

In some cases, a better strategy would have been to go for two sentences rather than a single sentence because doing so would have resulted in better sentences composition. Sometimes new words were introduced in order to be able to express the message of all sentences in a single sentences but there is a possibility that some of the original information will be lost in combining sentences into a single sentence.