Understanding the passive voice in English

tiger

This short lesson will help you do three things:

Make the form of a passive clause accurately.
Know when to use passive clauses.
Understand passive clauses and why they are used.

We will start with the grammar and form.

Forming the passive

In English there are two voices: active and passive.
They look like this:

Active voice: John stole the book
In this sentence, we know who did what and we know what happened to the book.
Passive voice: The book was stolen
In this sentence, we know what happened to the book but we do not know who did it.

Let's take the first sentence, John stole the book, and see what the grammar is. We have:

The subject	The verb	The object
John	stole	the book

Task 1: It is important to understand this so try a little test to see if you can say what the subjects, the verbs and the objects are in these sentences.
Click on

when you have written your answers.

Mary opened the letter
My sister and I have bought tickets to the concert
The old man in the corner with the dog has been telling really good stories
She went to London

	The subject	The verb	The object
1	Mary	opened	the letter
2	My sister and I	have bought	tickets to the concert
3	The old man in the corner with the dog	has been telling	really good stories
4	She	went	NO OBJECT!

You can see that subjects, verbs and objects can be more than one word. In these examples, we have subject, verb and object phrases not just single words.
The other important thing to notice is that some verbs cannot have an object at all. They are called intransitive verbs and other examples are appear, arrive, come, fall, go, happen, lie, listen, live, rise, snow, wait and walk. There are lots more.
With these verbs it is not possible to make a passive sentence.

When we have a passive sentence, the grammar is different and we do it like this:

The patient	The verb	plus sometimes	The agent
The letter	was opened		by Mary
Tickets to the concert	have been bought		by my sister and I

Most of the time, we do not say what the agent is because we are more interested in the patient.

Task 2: Look at the verb in the passive sentences.
What do you notice?
Click on

when you have thought about this.

We have changed
    opened
to
    was opened
and we have changed
    have bought
to
    have been bought
by putting in the verb be in the correct tense form.

Task 3: Look at these two sentences. The first is active and the second is passive.
What do you notice about the verb?
Click on

when you have thought about this.

John wrote a letter
A letter was written

We have put in the verb be as we did before, but we have also changed the main verb from wrote to written. Because many verbs in English are the same in the past and the past participle, it is not always easy to see this.
All the regular verbs in English have the same form in the past and for the past participle.
However, these verbs all change:

Stem	Past form	Past participle		Stem	Past form	Past participle
begin break choose do draw drink drive eat forbid forget freeze give	began broke chose did drew drank drove ate forbade forgot froze gave	begun broken chosen done drawn drunk driven eaten forbidden forgotten frozen given		hide know ring see shake show steal take tear throw wear write	hid knew rang saw shook showed stole took tore threw wore wrote	hidden known rung seen shaken shown stolen taken torn thrown worn written

and there are more. For a full list or the irregular verbs in English, click here.

We are interested in the past participle forms here because we always use them in passive sentences.

If we want to make an active clause passive, we do this. There are 8 easy steps and for our example, we will use this sentence:
My Aunt Mary has broken the wine glass

Task 4: Here are the eight steps. Click on the

for each step to make sure you have the right answer.

Step 1: Find the subject of the sentence.	That's the first word or phrase usually and in this sentence it is: My Aunt Mary
Step 2: Find the object of the sentence.	This usually comes after the verb, often at the end of the sentence and in this case it is: the wine glass
Step 3 Check the tense of the verb.	In this case, the verb phrase is has broken and we know that this is the present perfect in English
Step 4 Move the object to the front of the sentence, making it the patient of the passive clause. What do you have?	You should have: The wine glass + My Aunt Mary has broken
Step 5 Add the verb be in the correct tense. What is it?	We know this is the present perfect (Step 3) so the form we want is: has been Now we have the start of the passive clause: The wine glass has been + my Aunt Mary
Step 6 Find the past participle of the main verb and put that next.	In this case, the verb is break and we know that it is formed as break - broke - broken so broken is the form we want. We can add that to our sentence and we get: The wine glass has been broken + My Aunt Mary
Step 7 Remove the old subject.	Now we have the passive sentence. It is: The wine glass has been broken
Step 8 If we want to, we can put the old subject back into the end of the sentence following the preposition by.	Now we have: The wine glass has been broken by my Aunt Mary

If you want to see this in action, watch this little video:

Task 5:
To check if you can see what the correct passive clause is, try this test.
You do not need the by-phrase in any of these but you can put it in if you think it is important.
The only difficult part is to decide on the correct form of the verb be.
Click on the

for each sentence to make sure you have the right answer.

John and Peter sold their old car	Their old car has been sold (?by John and Peter)
The government of The United kingdom has passed a new law	A new law has been passed (by the government of the United Kingdom)
My friends and I will do all the hard work	All the hard work will be done (by my friends and I)
The police officer is going to stop the cars on the main road	The cars on the main road are going to be stopped (by the police officer)
My wife had left the front door open	The front door had been left open (by my wife)
We must ask a question	A question must be asked (by us)
Lots of people used to take this road to the beach	This road used to be taken to the beach (by lots of people)
The paper delivery girl will have left the newspaper in the front of the house	The newspapers will have been left in the front of the house (by the paper delivery girl)
People admire John	John is admired (?by people)

When do I use the by-phrase?

Why do we use a passive?

Look at the first and last sentences in the test above.

The first sentence is:
John and Peter sold their old car
and that was changed to:
Their old car was sold
but we put a question mark by the phrase by John and Peter because we know that it was their car and we believe that only they could sell the car.
It is not necessary to say by John and Peter.

The last sentence is:
People admire John
and that was changed to:
John is admired
It is not necessary to include by people because we know that only people can admire things or other people.
It is not necessary to add the phrase.

The reason for this is that we use a passive when:

We do not know who did something so we get, for example:
My car was stolen
and it is not necessary to add by someone I don't know because we are only interested in the car.
It is impossible to know who did something so we get, for example:
Factories have been built here
and we cannot add a by-phrase because it is not possible to know who built the factories.
It is obvious who did or does something so we get, for example:
The theatre was filled
and it is not necessary to add by the audience of people because we know that.
We do not want to say who does or did something so we get, for example:
The question was asked
and we do not want to say who asked the question (perhaps it's embarrassing).

In English 80% of passive sentences do not include the agent with a by-phrase.

Task 6:
Click here to do a quick test to see if you have understood this.
Click on the Back button to come back.

If you want a simple rule for using the passive, here it is:

If the object of an active sentence is more important and more interesting than the subject, make a passive clause.

The other 20%

We know now that we can change:
I broke the window
to
The window was broken
because we want to hide the fact that we broke it. That's reason 4. above.

Sometimes, however, we include the by-phrase because we want to say that who did something is important. Then we can say:
The window wasn't broken BY ME. My sister broke it!

At other times, we include the by-phrase because we want to say that who or what did something is surprising or unusual.
Then, for example, we might get:
The house was built by the family
and the hearer knows that we are saying that this is quite surprising. Families do not usually build houses; builders do that.

Using the passive in a text

We often use the passive voice in written texts because it is a more formal way of expressing our thoughts. However, in written texts, there is another reason for using the passive.
For example:

Task 7:
Which sentence, A. or B., best follows the first clause in this sentence?
Click on the

when you have made your choice.

The sentence beginning:
John's house had just been painted in a bright pink colour ...

... so it was really easy for me to find it
... and he was waiting at home for me

It's easy to see that clause A. follows the beginning of the sentence because it is about the colour of the house, not about John. The second clause is about John and we are not interested in John, we are interested in his house. That's one reason the passive voice is used.
So, what we do is to make a passive clause so we can focus on what is important to us and then we can make the next clause about the important part of the first clause.
Try another one:

Task 8:
Which sentence, A. or B., best follows the first clause in this sentence?
Click on the

when you have made your choice.

The sentence beginning:
The presentation was given by Mary at the meeting and ...

... she was very persuasive
... it was very short

Here, we have used the agent in the phrase by Mary so it is logical to follow the first clause with something about Mary, not about the presentation. So, the correct answer is A. again because that clause is about Mary.

What happens is that the second clause in a sentence is often the subject of the next sentence in English (and not only in English). This is just one way to make any text you write flow logically and help the reader to understand.

Task 9:
Here's another example. What are the connections?
Click on the text when you have an answer..

Easy.

The other verb to make a passive

In English, we can have, for example:

The window was broken during the storm
and we know that this was an action that happened (and it is obvious what did it).
But we can also have:
The window was broken so the room was cold
and we know that this was a state, not an action.

In some languages, a different verb is used to make a difference between something that happened and something that existed.
We can do this in English but we do not have to do it.
For these sentences in English we can have:

The window got broken during the storm
or
The window was broken during the storm
and we can say:
The window was broken so the room was cold
but we cannot say
*The window got broken so the room was cold

In other words, we can always use the verb be for any passive clause but we can only use get for actions.

The verb get used for the passive is sometimes too informal so you are always safe using be for both types of clause.

That's the end of this short lesson.
If you would like to try some short exercises on making passive clauses, there are two in the exercise index for this level.
Click here to go there.