Active voice is the default sentence construction in which the grammatical subject performs the action, following the natural subject-verb-object order: "John kicked the ball." The subject ("John") is the doer, the verb ("kicked") is the action, and the object ("the ball") receives it. Compare the passive rewrite, "The ball was kicked by John," which reverses the order and buries the doer at the end.
Active sentences are usually shorter, clearer, and more energetic than their passive equivalents because they name the actor up front and use a direct verb instead of a "to be + participle" construction. "The committee approved the budget" (active, five words) says the same thing as "The budget was approved by the committee" (passive, seven words) with less scaffolding. Across a whole document those savings add up and tend to improve readability scores, since fewer words per sentence and fewer syllables are exactly what those formulas reward.
Almost every editorial style guide — from journalism to plain-language government standards to technical writing manuals — recommends active voice as the default. It makes writing more accountable (you must say who did what), more concrete, and easier to follow. The nuance is that "default" does not mean "always": passive voice remains the right choice when the actor is unknown, unimportant, or best de-emphasised. A practical editing habit is to scan for forms of "to be" plus a past participle, then ask whether naming the actor would make the sentence stronger; often it will. Draft in active voice, then measure the leaner result in our Word Counter.