: Re: What does active voice mean? I was reading on here about passive voice but didn't really know what active voice was. I read some examples but was hoping for more insight. What does it

@Murray831

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A verb is in the active voice if the agent of the verb (i.e., the pronoun/noun phrase that does the verb) is in the subject position (usually, but not always before the verb); it is in passive voice if the agent is in object position. Not all verbs are in either the active or the passive voice.
Examples
Geoffrey Pullum has three examples of sentences wrongly characterised in Strunk&White as passive in his 50 years of stupid grammar advice anniversary polemic, the first of which is:

There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.

Here there are two verbs, the first of which has no agent (it is a modal verb), the second of which is a participle, with its agent in subject position.
Not all verbs are in either the active or passive voice:

If six was nine. — "was" is here, I think, most widely considered to be not an agentive verb but a stative verb, so this sentence has neither agent nor patient, instead it has a stative subject and a predicative object.
To boldly go where no man has gone before! — Infinitives are agentless;
Keep it to yourself! — The agent of a command is presumed to be whomever the command is addressed to, and need not be specified.

How to choose
The active voice has a built-in advantage that it is almost always simpler and briefer, because you don't need an auxiliary verb, which passive constructions need in English. So use the active unless there is a compelling reason not to.
The two most important reasons why the passive might be appropriate are, first, it can give finer control over information conveyed (e.g., Mary was killed!) or secondly, it can change emphasis by giving control over the order in which information is presented (e.g., It was Mary who Jack killed.)

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