Evan - TS#16
For our final session Bruce and I met one of my favorite aspects of writing, passive voice. When I call it my favorite, I mean I hate it and want it expunged. This was another such session where explaining the theory behind the language was quite difficult. I managed to describe the difference in terms of actual action, like a ball being picked up. Who acts? Me or the ball? That is active voice, passive voice is when the object of action is the subject of a sentence. See? This sucks, describing passive voice. It's less impactful, but it is also used in certain aspects of informal speech, emphasis or certain use cases. We worked through the theory first, and this is where our more rigorous review of syntax helped quite a bit. When I told Bruce that the object of action becomes the subject, he seemed to understand, and he intuited the difference in the sentence structure, while still understanding they meant the same things. Furthermore, he picked up the examples without much more than some small grammar corrections. The activity we worked on first asked for some conversions to passive voice, while the more complicated ones asked for conversions from to the other at a whim. Bruce picked this concept up, at least that of the sentence structure -perhaps not the use case- very quickly. He had had an exam that day, and so we ended early.
He was a wonderful tutee, I could not have asked for a more accommodating and patient tutee. Wonderful manners and with a driven mind, I'm sure he will master English given time. We agreed to continue meeting seeing as my studies were continuing anyways.
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