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OVERVIEW:  Passive Voice (3 pages)

The passive voice is a grammatical structure that indicates a special way of thinking.  In the passive sentence, the subject receives rather than gives the action of the verb.  Consider the following two sentences:

1.   The sun warms the earth.  (active)

2.   The earth is warmed by the sun.  (passive)

Both sentences mean roughly the same thing, but they suggest two different ways of thinking.

Sentence 1, an active sentence, uses the most common English order of thought: Subject > -- Verb > -- Object.  In this sentence, the sun (Subject) gives the action of warming to the earth (Object):  “The sun warms the earth.”

Sentence 2, although it means about the same thing as sentence 1, is a passive sentence.  It uses a different order of thought: 

Subject < -- Verb -- < (by) Object.  Sentence 2 focuses on the receiver of the action, not the giver.  The earth (Subject) receives the action of warming from the sun (Object):  “The earth is warmed by the sun.”

The difference between active and passive is very important in understanding, speaking, and reading English.  This difference is centered on two things, the direction of the action, and the verb form that represents that direction.  Learning the passive voice requires that you learn to associate the direction of the action with the corresponding verb forms.

You do this already with active verbs.  When you see the word “warms”, you know automatically that Something warms Something Else, that the action flows from left to right: --->.  To master the passive voice, you must associate grammatical structure “is warmed” with the opposite flow, with the idea that Something is warmed by Something Else,:  <---.

Forms

Passive verb forms are easy to make and recognize:  all of them use the auxiliary verb “be” and end with the past participle of the main verb.  Basically, you make whatever passive tense you want by putting “be” in that tense and then adding the past participle of the main verb.  If, for example, you want to make the simple future passive of the verb “bite”, you make the simple future of “be”, which is “will be”, and add the past participle, “bitten”:  “will be bitten”.  If you want to make the present perfect, you do the same thing.  Take the present perfect of “be”, which is “have been”, and add the past participle, “bitten”:  “have been bitten”.  A table of common passive forms follows:

                                 Common Passive Forms

                 Present                  Past                                Future    

                   am                                was  

                    is + warmed by were + warmed            will be + warmed

Simple       are

                    The earth is warmed The children were      The woman’s heart

                    by the sun.                  warmed by the fire.    will be warmed by

                                                                                                these flowers.

                    am being                     was being

                    is being + warmed     were being + warmed

Progressive        are being                                                          

                                                                                                   Quite Rare

                    Dinner is being           While dinner was

                    warmed right now.     being warmed, I

                                                          listened to music.

                    have been                   had been + warmed

                    has been + warmed                                        

Perfect

                    I have been warmed  Although the children   Quite Rare

                    by your kindness.      had been warmed by

                                                          the fire, the snow

                                                          made them cold again.

Perfect          Quite Rare          Quite Rare          Quite Rare

Progressive

Special Points

Not all verbs have passive forms.  Only transitive verbs--those which can have a direct object--can be made passive.  Many verbs, then, including such linking verbs as “be”, “seem”, and “appear”, are never passive.  Other verbs are sometimes transitive, sometimes not.  In the sentence “He runs every day”, “runs” has no direct object; in this sentence, the verb is intransitive, and the idea cannot be expressed passively.  In the sentence “He runs a language school”, “runs” has a direct object; here “runs” is transitive, and the idea can be passively expressed:  “A language school is run by him.”

Not all passive sentences use “by” followed by the giver of the action; many in fact, do not.  Often, we choose the passive because we do not know or care who gave the action:  “My wallet was stolen.”  Other times, the passive is used to avoid the responsibility for an action:  “Orders were given to shoot all prisoners, even the children.”  Because “by” is not always used, you must learn to recognize passive sentences from the verb form.