Grammatically Correct: The writer's essential guide to punctuation ...

GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT
waiters had to carry in the wedding cake, because the cake, not
the waiters, is the focus of the sentence.
Often, the decision as to which voice is more appropriate can be
made only by considering the larger context. Thus, you would say
Very young babies prefer black-and-white images if you are writing
about how babies of various ages respond to colors; however, if
your focus is on the colors themselves, it would be better to word
this information as Black-and-white images are preferred by very
young babies. That is, neither form is inherently better: The purpose
and context of your writing should determine which voice is
used.
• When the doer can be inferred or is not of interest.
It would be better to say The cake wasn't served until two in
the morning rather than The waiters didn't serve the cake until
two in the morning, if (a) it can be inferred that the waiters did
the serving and (b) it doesn't matter anyway, and using the active
voice would put an inappropriate emphasis on the wrong part of
the sentence. If there were some relevance to who served the cake,
that would be different: For example, The bride herself served the
cake, and the groom handed out the forks.
• To avoid using the first-person-singular pronoun.
In academic writing, it is conventional to avoid saying I when
referring to one's own work (although we is generally acceptable).
The usual strategy is to word things in the passive voice: Tilus, instead
of I randomly assigned the subjects to each group, saying Subjects
were randomly assigned to each group. Here again, the focus of
the writing is on what is being done, not on who is doing it.
• To avoid using all-male pronouns.
Many writers prefer not to refer to a generic individual of unspecified
sex exclusively as he. The problem is, there is no pronoun in
English that can be used to indicate a single person of either sex,
so more inventive strategies are needed. One approach is to word
sentences in the passive voice to avoid the need for pronouns
altogether. For example, instead of saying The average driver
trades in his car every jour years, you could say The average
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