Meaning
Receptive Focus
The Passive Voice is used to express what happens to the subject, rather than what the subject does or has. How something or someone is affected by an action or event is sometimes more important than whatever caused it.
Consider the example “The trapped hikers were rescued four days later.” The Active Voice version of this sentence might be something like, “A rescue party rescued the trapped hikers four days later.” Both sentences are valid. However, the active sentence is centered around the rescue party and what they did. Within the context, both the speaker and the audience are probably less concerned with the identity of the rescue party and more concerned about the safety of the hikers. The passive version of this sentence ensures that the hikers are front and center, even though they were not the ones who carried out the action.
Agents & Patients
The noun that carries out an action verb is called the agent, while other nouns within that clause that are affected by the verb are called patients or targets. In an Active Voice sentence, the subject is the agent and any direct or indirect objects are the patients. But with Passive Voice, those roles are swapped; a patient becomes the subject while the agent becomes an object.
In the example above, the hikers are the patients (in both versions of the sentence) and the rescue party is the agent.
Patients are more important than agents in Passive Voice. In some cases, the agent is so unimportant to the context that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned in the sentence.
Structure
BE + Passive Participle
The main verb of a Passive Voice clause should be in the Passive Participle form. Most verbs will take on the -ed suffix for this form, but irregular verbs may undergo a different transformation (as in ‘began’, ‘caught’, ‘seen’, or ‘went’).
There should also be some form of the auxiliary verb BE immediately before the Passive Participle main verb. The form of BE is determined by the auxiliary verb that precedes it, or else (if BE is the leading auxiliary) by time and agreement with the subject.
- “I was followed.” [Past Simple]
- “They were followed.” [Past Simple]
- “They are being followed.” [Present Continuous]
- “They have been followed.” [Present Perfect]
- “They will be followed.” [Future Simple]
Note that the Passive BE is distinct from the Continuous BE; for a verb phrase that is both Continuous and Passive, there must be two BE auxiliary verbs.
‘by’
Sometimes the agent is voiced in a Passive Voice clause, in which case it comes after the preposition ‘by’. This prepositional phrase typically comes after the verb string, though there may or may not be other modifiers between them. For example, “They were followed by a mysterious figure last night,” and “They were followed last night by a mysterious figure,” are equal and both acceptable.
Other times, the agent is unvoiced — that is, it does not appear in the sentence. This may because the agent is one or more of the following:
- obvious (eg: “The jewels were stolen by a thief.”)
- unknown (eg: “A note was left on the counter by someone.”)
- irrelevant to the context (eg: telling a disappointed child “The playground was demolished by Carrington Construction.”)
- purposefully obscured (eg: “Mistakes were made by the company’s leadership.”)
When the agent is obvious, unknown, irrelevant, or obscured, it is common practice to exclude the by-agent prepositional phrase. For the above examples, it would be more common to simply say “The jewels were stolen,” “A note was left on the counter,” “The playground was demolished,” and “Mistakes were made.”
Usage
Contextual Flow
The main reason to use Passive Voice is to keep the subject — even though it’s a patent instead of the agent — as the focus of the sentence. Recall the scenario of the trapped hikers earlier on this page; that sentence would likely come at the end of a story detailing the hikers’ experience. Especially if it was told from the hikers’ perspective, it might be rather jarring to suddenly focus on people who are not trapped, depending on the style of the story. In many cases, if we were already talking about the hikers, the paragraph would flow better by keeping hikers as the subject of most sentences. So when revealing what happened to them, the speaker would simply have to use Passive Voice instead of Active Voice.
Poor Agents
As shown in the ‘by’ section above, there are multiple reasons not to include the agent (and the whole by-agent prepositional phrase). Naturally, if the agent is removed from the sentence, then it can’t be the subject. A different noun — a patient — would then need to be the subject instead. Using a patient as the subject is the very point of Passive Voice.
Sometimes Passive Voice is the best option — or even the only option — because the agent cannot or should not be mentioned in the sentence.
Common Applications
Whether we realize it or not, Passive Voice is used in everyday situations. Often the best way to answer the question, “What happened?” is with Passive Voice. Here are just a few sets of applications where Passive Voice is common:
Background Information
- “I was born in January.”
- “The process is called transmutation.”
- “These muffins were made from scratch.”
News Reports
- “The company’s next product will be announced on Friday.”
- “The town has been flooded.”
- “The criminal was arrested this morning.”
Exchange
- “The painting was sold at the auction.”
- “I’m sorry, your credit card has been rejected.”
- “She was awarded first prize!”
The Passive Voice is also used in conjunction with the Full Infinitive for the popular acronyms ‘TBA’ (‘to be announced’), ‘TBC’ (‘to be confirmed’), and ‘TBD’ (‘to be determined’).
When Not to Use Passive Voice
‘Avoid Passive Voice’ is common advice for writers. Indeed, it is typically more engaging to read a novel or an article when the nouns are taking action. Of course, when things happen to those nouns, then the Passive Voice is appropriate. What this advice should say instead is to keep the focus on the nouns that are agents most of the time.
“The soup was hastily eaten by the captain,” is almost certainly a poor sentence in any context. Why are we placing so much focus on the soup? The Active Voice “The captain hastily ate her soup,” not only keeps the focus on a character who is probably the agent of many verbs in the story, it also gives more energy to that depiction of lunch.
There are many reasons to use Passive Voice. But if you do not have a specific reason to use Passive Voice, it is far better to stick with Active Voice.
Advanced Concepts
Complex Verb Strings
Passive Participle might seem a little messy when the verb is in a more complex and/or has modal verbs. For example, the verb strings in “They may have been trapped by the snow,” and “The roads will be being plowed all day long,” look dauting. Thankfully, it’s rare to use verbs strings this complex. But if they come up, here are a few things to remember:
- The passive auxiliary verb BE should always be the last of the auxiliary verbs.
- The form of the passive BE is determined by the auxiliary verb that precedes it.
- As mentioned earlier, the Passive BE is distinct from the Continuous BE; a Continuous Tense verb in the Passive Voice should have two instances of BE in the same verb string.
- The main verb of any Passive Voice clause should be in the Passive Participle form, regardless of tense.
‘Get’ or ‘Become’
The auxiliary verb BE is fairly static. When the verb needs to be more dynamic — as when showing a significant change over time — we can use some form of the words get (‘get’, ‘gets’, ‘got’, or ‘gotten’) or possibly become in place of BE.
The sentences “My watch is being repaired as we speak,” and “My watch is getting repaired as we speak,” are virtually the same, but the latter places a bit more emphasis on the implication that the watch’s end state will be different from how it was before the repair.
Received Directives
We can use Passive Voice in Verb Patterns to express directives that we have received. For example:
- “She was forced to admit her mistake.”
- “From a young age, I was taught to respect my elders.”
- “They were expected to complete their chores before dinner.”
These might reveal the subject’s upbringing, or they could explain instructions or other types of influence that the subject has recently received.
Patientive Verbs & Middle Voice
There are some verbs that by their definitions already show what is happening to the subject. For example, in the sentence “The pie is cooling on the countertop,” the verb ‘cool’ is what’s happening to the subject; the sentence has the structure of Active Voice but the meaning of Passive Voice, and thus we might say it has Middle Voice.
Let’s identify a classification of verbs called Patientive Verbs — that is, verbs for which the subject is automatically the patient. Examples of Patientive Verbs include ‘appear’, ‘melt’, ‘remain’, ‘run’, ‘sink’, and ‘sound’, just to name a few. Since these verbs already have a passive meaning, it make little sense to put them into Passive Voice; in many cases, the result would simply be awkward. Thus, it is best not to use Passive Voice with Patientive Verbs.
Stative Verbs
Similarly, Stative Verbs (like ‘have’, ‘like’, and ‘think’) are usually not used with Passive Voice, although this is not a hard rule; there are some occasions when doing so would be appropriate.
Teaching Tips
Familiarity
Since Active Voice is often treated as the ‘default’ way to form a sentence, Passive Voice can sometimes feel like it’s an exception to the rule or a backward way of constructing a clause. Give students examples of common expressions that use Passive Voice to show that this structure isn’t all that foreign. It’s quite possible learners have even used Passive Voice before without even knowing it!
Start Simple
When students are first getting used to Passive Voice, it may be best to stick with simple tenses, and perhaps only with declarative sentences. When this topic appears again at a later level, introduce interrogatives and more complex tenses. Many textbooks will take this approach anyway.
Steps from Active to Passive
Some textbooks directly or indirectly draw comparisons between a sentence in Active Voice and the corresponding Passive Voice version of that sentence. Asking students to form their own Passive Voice sentences might be challenging. Start by explaining the process of converting a clause from active to passive, and break it down into three or four clear steps. Visit Insight’s video page to see how we do it.
Insider Access
Visit our How to Teach Passive Voice page on www.insightstoEnglish.com for a demonstrational video, bonus notes, printouts, a slideshow for your class, practice activities, and more.
Further Reading
Encyclopedia Pages
- Passive Participles
- Passive & Active Adjectives – the passive trait as a modifier
- Perfect Tenses – another application of the Passive/Perfect Participle
Insights Articles
- project: Milestones
- project: Mistakes Were Made
- Is it Okay to Break Grammar Rules?
Intermediate Topics
CEFR Levels B1-B2: Pre-Intermediate to Upper Intermediate courses
