As an example of the passive voice I offer the following sentence: “The dog was hit by a car.” I then ask students to make it active: “A car hit the dog.” It is usually clear that the second sentence ...

Semicolons can combine two complete sentences (without a conjunction) when the sentences are closely related and it would make sense to combine the sentences with "and." Example: The chapter ends as ...

Simple sentences are important for making clear points. Be careful though - if you only ever use simple sentences in your writing you don’t add much detail, so your reader could lose interest.