Where did that donkey kick a man? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/politics_and_the_english_language Politics and the English language] is an essay where George Orwell takes issue with how little people know about what Democracy is. An essay says that wikipedia is not a democracy. The rest of us want it to resemble whatever we hav come to understand that Democracy is. "If language can corrupt thought, then thought can also corrupt language." At the end of the essay, he stated six rules for clear writing. Number four says write in the active voice. It is easy to forget that rule, and once a sentence is passive, someone might recognize it without knowing how to activate it. The vast majority of sentences containing "by" are passive. i.e. "The man was kicked by the donkey.". Another way to write it is "The will of the donkey caused the man to be kicked". That breaks rule number three. Forms of "to be" are other flag-words for passive voice. If a sentence introduces object before subject, then it is passive. In an active sentence, you can read cause and effect. In a passive sentence, things are more existential; things just happen, or they just are. "The man was kicked into the barn." is a passive construction. "Someone or something kicked the man" is active, even though it uses inspecific pronouns. Sometimes, finding the right pronouns is all you need for activating a sentence. A donkey kicked a man into the barn. _______ Spammerz suk Uranus tiL they're fuL uv politiks.