Passive Voice

What is the passive voice?

In general we tend to use the active voice. That is when a subject does an action to an object.

E.g.: Somebody stole my laptop. (subject = Somebody / action(verb) = stole / object = my laptop)

The passive voice is used when we want to emphasize the action (the verb) and the object of a sentence rather than subject. This means that the subject is either less important than the action itself or that we don’t know who or what the subject is. See an eample:

My laptop was stolen. (The object – now the subject = My laptop / action= was stolen)

The passive agent

When we know who the subject is, we put it at the end with by. We call this an agent.

The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. (agent =Leonardo Da Vinci )

Forming the passive voice

The passive voice is not a tense in English. Each tense has its own passive voice which is created by using a form of the auxiliary verb to be + V3 (past participle)