: 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

@Kaufman555

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In answer to Charles Stewart:
I would suggest that any verb with a subject must be active or passive. Those are the only constructions we have. We can make passive versions of all your examples, so they must by definition be active voice.

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground." There is no modal here; we have the existential "there" construction with "be" (not a modal) , where "There" is a dummy subject delaying the 'real' subject "dead leaves". This sentence is active voice - Compare with the passive - "There are said to be a great number of leaves lying on the ground".
"If six was nine" - we definitely have a subject, and it uses a normal active construction, so this is also active voice. Compare the passive - "If six was added to nine ..."
Infinitives can also be subjects in active constructions - "To have loved and lost is better than not to have loved at all." Compare the passive - "To have been loved ...". Your Startrek sentence fragment has no verb, so is obviously neither active nor passive voice. But we can even give that a passive infinitive - "To be boldly led where no man has gone before!" - infinitives have two passive forms - "to be done" and "to have been done" - so the standard forms are active.
I would argue that standard imperatives are also active as you can also have passive imperatives - "Please be assured", and the subject is understood.
You say that active is better than passive "because you don't need an auxiliary verb". This is only true in present and past simple positive forms. In EFL/ESL we use a twelve tense system. If we take it that each tense has three forms: positive, negative and interrogative, that means that only in two out of thirty-six forms is this true.
Active "is almost always simpler and briefer". But in some 80% of passive sentences we don't use an agent, so this doesn't necessarily follow at all. "They sacked him." "He was sacked." And You can be just as formal and wordy in the active as in the passive.
A few other occasions when it is appropriate to use the passive -
a. When the agent is unknown, important or obvious - "He's been arrested."
b. To avoid a long subject - "We were very impressed by his obvious enthusiasm for the subject." (end-weighting)
c. To start a sentence with familiar 'given' information, and introduce new information later in the sentence - "They just arrived five minutes ago. Their train was delayed because of accident."

@Jonny - The easy answer to your question is that a verb is active if it is in a normal tense form and is not in a passive construction, which involves different forms of the verb 'to be' + the past participle of the main verb.

He writes books / was writing a book / will have written a book - active
This book was written a long time ago/ is being written right now/ had been written in Latin first - passive

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