Active & Passive Voice

What exactly is Voice?

Voice is the grammatical term for the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the verb.

In English there are two voices, the Active and the Passive.

1      The Active Voice

The subject of the sentence carries out the verb.   Perhaps it’s easiest to think of the subject as the perpetrator of the action!

Linda threw the ball.

Tim arrived yesterday.

My dog ate my slippers.

          – all very straightforward.

2       The Passive Voice

Its title sounds somewhat daunting but the passive voice is far from that.   If you think about it, a passive person is one who sits back and lets it all happen to him or her: this is a person who is not assertive.   Exactly the same is true in grammar.

Again, the term, passive, comes from our old friends, the Greek and Latin languages, where the verb from which passive is derived means to suffer.  Think of a passion play for instance: it’s about the passion of Jesus – not his passion for chocolate but his suffering on the cross.

And so we have the passive voice in grammar.  The passive is the means of expressing how the action of the verb is carried out on the subject rather than by the subject.

All the pudding was eaten.

The broadcast was interrupted.

The broadcast was interrupted by a thunderstorm.

So, in summary, the active voice has the subject carry out the action:

The boy ate the cake.

In contrast, the passive voce has the subject ‘suffer’ the action:

The cake was eaten by the boy.

  The child was hit by a car.

In case you’re still not sure, the best way to check whether a verb is in the active or passive voice is to begin by locating that verb.

The boy ate the cake:    verb = ate

Then ask who or what before the verb:   who ate?

The answer is the boy.   The boy is the subject and he did the eating so he certainly didn’t suffer anything.   ate = active voice.

In contrast, The cake was eaten by the boy.    verb = was eaten

Who or what was  eaten?     the cake

The cake is the subject.   Did it carry out the action or did the action happen to it?    The cake suffered the action – therefore the verb, was eaten, is in the passive voice.

A Simple Comparison of Active & Passive Verb Forms

Specific Uses of the Passive Voice

The passive voice is very often used in reporting when the speaker or the writer doesn’t want to disclose – or doesn’t know – certain details.

It has been said that …    by whom?

It is widely believed that …    by whom?

By using the passive voice, the writer can avoid having to name or declare his sources.

So, why do we say: Hamlet was written by Shakespeare rather than Shakespeare wrote Hamlet? 

The answer:  partly convention, partly the music of the language and partly because we all know who Shakespeare was and so we single out one of his works as the focus of the sentence.

Be vs Get

In these challenging COVID-19 times, there is one example of the use of the passive which grates on my nerves.  When I was a schoolboy teachers deducted one mark for every get used in our written work.

I’m sick of politicians et al. telling us all to get tested for COVID-19.   We should BE tested!

Get, a verb which really means fetch,is grossly overused and rather indicates that we either lack knowledge of a more precise word – or we are too lazy to think.

Think!   Speak well!   Take pride in our language!

So, let’s aim high and form the passive with be  —>  People should BE tested.

For detailed instructions about how to form the passive voice in all verb tenses, please refer to a good textbook or an app such as Understanding English Grammar.