Active and Passive Voice

To be completely honest, I still don't understand this topic. We'll both be learning something new today!

Active= the subject of the sentence is "acting"
Passive= the subject and target of the subject switch positions

I'm always told to write with an active voice in essay's, who knows if I've managed it. I asked a bunch of people if they knew of a way to quickly describe it to get it through a lot easier, turns out, they didn't even know there was Active vs. Passive. This obviously shows how much of a problem it is in English. *whispers* I blame the teachers.

Here's a few examples to try and help:

Active:
I threw the ball.
Tricia loves Frodo.
The 16th Century poets most often dealt with the theme of...
You heard it on the radio.

Passive:
The ball was thrown by me. OR The ball was thrown.
Frodo is loved by Tricia.
The theme that was most dealt with by the 16th Century poets was...
Heard on the radio was a song.

Wow, those Passive examples were really boring. Basically, active keeps the reader interested because it has characters which draw you in and you know the subject and what they are doing. Passive can bore them to death because there's either something completely missing (the person performing the action) or the subject seems to be acted upon by the verb.

When you don't want to put the blame or responsibility on someone however, then use passive voice to save yourself or others from extreme embarrassment! Here are some example sentences:

Mistakes were made.
The files will be sent as soon as possible.