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Active and passive voice

We use active voice

when the grammatical subject of the sentence

is performing the action.

Let’s assume you saw your friend Lina

cleaning the house.

And say:

Lina cleans the house.

Lina is your subject.

Because she is performing the action “cleaning”.

Now let’s make the house

the subject of the sentence.

Assume Lina’s mother comes home

She is concerned about the house being cleaned

rather than who did it.

So she says:

Nice, the house is cleaned!

And then she looks at you

and she asks:

Who cleaned it?

Was it you?

and you point at Lina and say:

She cleaned it.

We use the active voice again

because it is important who cleaned the house now.

As you can see

both sentences make sense

in their own specific situation

and they are both grammatically correct.

But it is really important to differentiate them

since the voice that you are using

can have a considerable effect on the message

that you are trying to convey to your listener.

How to construct the passive voice?

Well

consider this sentence in active voice

The cat ate the mouse.

The cat is your subject.

The mouse is your object

and “ate” is the verb

past tense of eat.

Right?

In passive voice the order is reversed

what was the object before is now the subject.

The verb also changes.

I can say the formula just in case

I don’t recommend to memorize it.

The be verb + past participle

It is also optional to add

your previous subject after by.

For example:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.

In this case

we don’t call the cat the subject anymore.

We call it the agent.

Why do we use passive voice?

There are also some other reasons

for using passive voice

one of them I mentioned already

to shift the focus from the subject to the object

for example:

The airplane was invented in the 20th century

by the Wright brothers.

The second reason is simply

because we don’t know who did it

or we just don’t wanna mention it for some reasons.

For example:

The packages were delivered on time.

The third reason is:

It is the language of science.

When we want to give information

we mostly use passive voice

because it puts emphasis on what is done

rather than who did it.

So one could say:

The humidity levels are measured every four hours.

Again we do not care who did the measuring

and that is why

we leave the doer of the action

out of the sentence.

Just go away, I don’t care about you.

OK

Now it’s your turn to practice a little bit.

Translate these sentences in the comments.

and

I’m going to see you soon

bye!