What is passive voice in English grammar? | Studio English
What is passive voice in English grammar? Understanding the passive voice in English Grammar is like a nightmare to most people, however, it’s not that hard, as you will see here.
We use the passive voice to show the interest in the subject that experiences an action, not the person who performs the action.
Let’s take it to step by step to understand it better.
How to teach passive voice in English?
If you are an English teacher then here’s your guide:
1- Start with the active voice:
Before you start teaching the passive voice you should first start teaching them the active voice, give them some easy examples, like:
- Erika loves hamsters.
- Pirates discover treasure.
- The clerk counted the money.
Now show them the structure of the active voice:
subject, verb, and object.
2- What is the rule of passive voice?
The second step is to introduce to them the passive voice and its structure.
Object + form of to be + past participle + by + subject
Then any active voice example and show them how to turn it into passive voice, here is an example:
Active voice: Harry ate six shrimp at dinner.
Passive voice: At dinner, six shrimp were eaten by Harry.
Then show them what each word of the sentence represents from the structure.
3- Remind them of ‘To Be’ And The Past Participle:
Make sure that all your students are aware of the forms of “to be” and past participles.
The forms of “to be” are: am, is, are, was, were, being, been.
While past participles are the verbs that end with ‘ed’ and make sure that they know when to use past participles. When you ensure that start teaching them how to make a passive voice sentence.
4- Switch The Subject and Object Of any active voice example:
Choose one of the examples that you used to demonstrate the active voice and let your students say which is the subject and which is the object.
In the example “Erika loves hamsters” the subject is Erika and hamsters are the object. So, if you switch the subject with the object, it will be “Hamsters loves Erika”. Which is not correct, this shows them that in order to change active to passive you don’t just switch the subject with the object. This leads to the next step.
5- Turn The Verb into Past Participle:
Now ask them to change the verb ‘loves’ to Past Participle. Now the verb will be ‘loved’. Now when you put up the sentence together it will become: “Hamsters loved Erika.” As you can see the sentence is becoming more and more closer to its correct form. So, let’s jump to the next step
6- Add ‘to be’ and ‘by’:
Write the structure again: Object + form of to be + past participle + by + subject
Now ask them to look at the structure of the sentence and see what is missing. They would say the ‘be verb’ and the word ‘by’, so ask them to fit them into the sentence to give the following form:
“Hamsters are loved by Erika.”
This is the correct form of the passive voice.
7- Check The Structure of the passive voice sentence:
To ensure that the sentence is following the passive voice structure check it again. Then ask your students to identify each part of the sentence.
8- Have Students Create Their Own Sentences:
Now they know the structure and they can fix passive voice and write their own examples. Ask them to write some passive voice exercises, then tell them to search for online examples to train so that they don’t forget the lesson.
How to understand passive voice?
Start by learning the active voice and its structure then learn the passive voice structure and start training yourself by switching the sentences from active to passive. To make it easy on yourself you could start by switching the subject with the object then turn The Verb into the Past Participle. Now there is only one thing lift which is adding ‘to be’ and ‘by’. Once you do so you will see how easy it is to understand it.
You can also search for passive voice online exercises in English grammar, also at the beginning you could use a passive voice checker to fix your writing however keep in mind that Grammar Checkers doesn’t fix or see all the passive voice. It will most likely miss some of them. However, it’s an effective tool to enhance your grammar.
What is passive voice in a sentence?
We use the passive voice to show the interest in the subject that experiences an action, not the person who performs the action.
How can you identify it? Look at the sentence and see what happened and who is responsible for the action. If you can’t find the person or something that is responsible for the action or if it comes in the sentence after the action that happened. Besides those two you should also find past participle and “to be,” now you can simply say its passive voice.
Here’s an example:
“The paper was passed by the professor.” That’s passive voice.
“The professor passed the paper.” That’s the active voice.
Where do we use passive voice?
The passive voice is used when we want to focus attention on the person or thing affected by the action.
It is often used in the following cases:
1- We do not know who did the action:
Active voice:
‘I don’t know who did it, but someone has let out my pet rabbit.’
‘I had the feeling that somebody was following me.’
‘My boss had instructed me to remove all the ashtrays.’
‘She discovered that the firm was paying her less than her male colleagues.’
Passive voice:
‘I don’t know who did it, but my pet rabbit has been let out.’
‘I had the feeling that I was being followed.’
‘I had been instructed to remove all the ashtrays.’
‘She discovered that she was being paid less than her male colleagues.’
2-If knowing the person or thing that is doing the action is not important:
‘Do you want a lift?’ ‘No thanks, I’m being collected.’
‘Do you want a lift?’ ‘No thanks, someone is collecting me.’
3-When the action is done by people in general:
‘All the Beatles records can be borrowed from the central library.
‘You can borrow all the Beatles records from the central library.
How do you use passive voice in English grammar?
Its structure is as follows:
Object + form of to be + past participle + by + subject
How do you write a passive sentence?
Object + form of to be + past participle + by + subject
All you need to do is to follow the same structure when writing a sentence and find some active voice words. And here is an example:
At dinner, six shrimp were eaten by Harry.
The flat tire was changed by Sue.
What is the difference between active and passive voice?
In the active voice, the sentence shows the subject that performs the action. For example:
“Erika loves hamsters” the subject is Erika and hamsters are the object. As you see the subject is the one who is performing the verb(action) which is Erika while the object hamsters are the ones receiving the action. And its structure is: subject + verb + object
While in the passive voice the verb comes before the subject. For example:
“Hamsters are loved by Erika.”
The passive voice structure is: Object + form of to be + past participle + by + subject
There are kinds of passive voice which include: past passive voice and passive present voice
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