• Please come in and pick your seats. Pick them carefully, as your seats will form the new seating chart.• Writing prompt:Remember that writing is an act of telepathy. On a single sheet of paper, please describe what you look like. Be specific. Beam a hologram of your appearance from your mind to the reader’s. At the end of your description, please write your new seat number (10 minutes).

Active Voice• Verbs come in two types: active and passive.• With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something.

Professor Binns peered at Hermione as though he had never seen a student properly before.

• With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen.

Hermione was peered at by Professor Binns as though he had never seen a student properly before.

AVOID THE PASSIVE TENSE!Creepy

King’s Examples (paragraph 5, handout)Passive VoiceMy first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun.

Active VoiceMy romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it.

Practice Active VoiceWith a partner, rewrite these sentences in active voice (5 min)

• The jar is filled with sand.• Reading is enjoyed by Mary.• The town was destroyed by fire.• The room will be cleaned by John every Saturday.• Cheese was eaten by Sara.• Why was the road crossed by the chicken?• The metropolis has been scorched by the dragon’s fiery breath.• A number of things are indicated by these results.

The Adverb is Not Your Friend• Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They usually end

in –ly.• According to King, adverbs reveal a writer’s fear that s/he is not

expressing her/himself clearly.

He closed the door firmly. He conquered the mountain triumphantly. She twirled her hair absent-mindedly. } You can probably infer, or

make a logical guess, the manner in which the character acted based on the surrounding text.