Oh god, here comes an active/passive sentence storm...
Best way to identify them is 1) Go read
The Elements of Style.
Here is a wonderful page that gives the gist of it, with arrows.
That's pretty neat page with the arrows and all. But since we're all standing in line to give PeeDee crap
, I thought I would just quibble with these two sentences from that page:
"
Authorities make rules to be broken," he said defiantly.
"
Rules are made to be broken," he said defiantly.
These are both ACTIVE sentences, with the subject being "he" and the verb being "said." Furthermore, they both have these "adverb" things (yet another part of speech, pick up any English textbook to learn about them) tacked on the end of a "said" tag, which by about every account I've read, is only acceptable in "Tom Swift" novels.
While I'm at it, the canonical "Tom Swifty" (a type of awful, awful, terrible adverbial pun based on the Tom Swift use of adverbs) I recall is:
"I dropped my toothpaste," Tom said, crestfallen.
grinning, ducking and running...
)