Verbs - Active and Passive

This lesson is about the active and passive voice we can use verbs with either the active voice or the passive voice and the active voice is when the person or thing performing the verb is also the subject of the sentence and the passive voice is when the subject is acted upon by the verb and intransitive verbs cannot be used in the passive voice but the active voice is generally considered to be the normal voice and overuse of the passive voice is considered to be post style and you may not notice this now but you certainly will by the end of the lesson that those two last sentences were in the passive voice.

I love the irony that the active voice is when the person or thing performing the verb is also the subject of the sentence sounds horribly complicated but it’ll be clear when you see it and the subject always comes before the verb so by using the active voice we make the subject the focus of the sentence.

Though Peter is reading a book Peter is the subject reading is the verb and the object is a book but Peter is performing the action reading or Jane eat a healthy salad yesterday.

The subject is Jane.

The verb is eight and there was a salad that she ate.

Jane is performing the action eight.

I will meet your brother in town tomorrow.

I am the subject verb is to meet and the object is your brother.

I am performing the action of meeting I would do sometimes have a situation where the active voice acts on itself and is therefore both subject and object and we sometimes call this the middle voice and these types of sentences usually have reflexive pronouns the singer hurt himself on the radio though the singer is the subject and himself is the object so is his both ends of the verb if you like so the himself is used as a reflexive way you wouldn’t say the singer heard he or him on the radio if it means himself I accidentally bit myself on the inside of my mouth and again I am the subject and myself being the object so it’s the middle voice or the model checked herself one last time before going onto the catwalk again model is both subject and object and this is why we use reflexive pronouns here when we form the passive voice we need a help a verb.

We we need the verb to be and we take the past participle form of the verb but the receiver of the action comes before the verb and the agent comes after the verb.

So we sort of swap around subject and object so the agent either personal thing performing the action is preceded by the preposition by and by using the passive voice we make the object the focus of the sentence.

the passive voice as we said is when the subject is acted upon by the verb and the subject would be the direct object in an active voice sentence and we use the passive voice to make the object the focus of the sentence have we take this active voice example.

His parents are always praising him.

So the focus is more on his parents but if we wish to put the focus on their child he would say he is always being praised by his parents and that’s the passive version or a classic example in the active voice.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F.

Kennedy.

But the important thing here is the president not the guy who did it.

So we will put this in a passive voice by saying John F.

Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and the other time we use the passive voice is when the agent is either unknown unimportant or implied and you’ll notice in these examples that the agents are not even mentioned and we can only do this in the passive voice there is a first example of an unknown agent.

My wallet was handed into the police station.

Now the thing that’s missing is by somebody we don’t know who somebody is and we don’t even need to know.

It’s just enough to say my wallet was handed into the police station we have an unimportant agent.

A musical concert was performed at the Town Hall.

Now in this particular case we’re not really concerned with the musicians and who exactly was playing.

Obviously the musicians care but for this sentence we’re not bothered about who played.

It’s just enough to say that a musical concert was performed at the Town Hall.

We can have an implied agent so ski equipment is usually sold in the winter months if you wanted to make it complete.

You would say by people working in the shop.

But this is kind of implied that there’s people working in the shop so we don’t need to use it all as we said at the start.

Overuse of the passive voice is considered to be Paul’s style.

Hopefully now you recognize this as a passive voice sentence implied by people who know about these things.

So there’s no real numbers but a guideline is about say about 10 percent of the sentences in passive voice and all the rest in active voice.

It makes the text more dynamic more interesting to read.

There are of course cases such as scientific reports and things like that which relies heavily on the passive voice because the thing being done is the important thing not who did it.

So you would say the reagents were mixed.

Not I mixed the reagents.

It doesn’t matter who did it.

Too you’ll see a lot of passive voice and things like technical reports.

But for normal text try and keep it to most 10 percent.