Forgive me. I should have written "passive voice". "There is" is a very passive voice phrase, IMO: one removes the action-maker, attributing whatever is happening to some ethereal force. It's passive because you have removed the subject, the maker / force that is performing the action of the sentence.
I guess the problem with these phrases is really too much use of the verb "to be", at the end of the day. From where I come from, people say "passive tense" when one uses too much "is" / "are" / "has been". I guess the verb "to be" is passive, in pretty much all its forms. Maybe it should be known as the "passive verb"! But I'm pretty sure the people that said "passive tense" to me and around me were decent people, writers and teachers, and we understood each other. Maybe that was a regional thing...
Hope that clears things up for you. I would not agree that "there is" or "there are" are at all active, or counterexamples. They're passive because of non-attribution, which seems very simple and clear to me.
"There is a big cat in the road." v. "Henry dumped a big cat in the road."
"To", or "this" or "that", I know less about. But repeatedly using "to" at the start of a sentence seems sketchy. I'd call it "making your speech/writing patterns 'too theoretical'", but that's just my instinctive take on it. Maybe you're trying so hard to prove your point, in your writing, that you're getting bogged down in literary baggage, or in being officious.
Oh, let me clarify myself!
I guess the problem with these phrases is really too much use of the verb "to be", at the end of the day. From where I come from, people say "passive tense" when one uses too much "is" / "are" / "has been". I guess the verb "to be" is passive, in pretty much all its forms. Maybe it should be known as the "passive verb"! But I'm pretty sure the people that said "passive tense" to me and around me were decent people, writers and teachers, and we understood each other. Maybe that was a regional thing...
Hope that clears things up for you. I would not agree that "there is" or "there are" are at all active, or counterexamples. They're passive because of non-attribution, which seems very simple and clear to me.
"There is a big cat in the road." v. "Henry dumped a big cat in the road."
"To", or "this" or "that", I know less about. But repeatedly using "to" at the start of a sentence seems sketchy. I'd call it "making your speech/writing patterns 'too theoretical'", but that's just my instinctive take on it. Maybe you're trying so hard to prove your point, in your writing, that you're getting bogged down in literary baggage, or in being officious.
I really don't know. Good luck!