EVOLVE Educational Vocational Objective Learning of Vernacular English

The Passive Voice

When we are writing instructions, using formal English or we don’t want to say who or what is responsible for an action, we can use the passive voice which is the opposite of the active voice. Before we can use the passive structure confidently we have to understand the basic construction of an English sentence.

The Active Voice- In English we put the verb between the subject - the person or thing responsible for the action, and the object – the person or thing that receives the action. A simple sentence would look like this                                        

Subject		verb		object
Kerry	>	watches	>	television
I	>	love	>	you
We	>	write	>	letters
Criminals	>	steal	>	cars

Here the arrows indicate the ‘direction’ of the action – from subject through the verb, to the object.

The Passive Voice- Let’s take the last example ‘Criminals steal cars.’ Here it is clear that criminals steal cars, because if a person steals a car they are automatically a criminal, but we still don’t know who exactly. In this case it would be much better to omit the subject and talk about what happens to the object. To do this we need to re-order the sentence by putting the object at the start.                      

Like the continuous forms, we use the auxiliary verb ‘be’ as a tense indicator but unlike the continuous forms, we don’t use ‘doing’ instead we use the past participle ‘done.’ So the sentence becomes:

Cars                 <                                  are                                            stolen.

Here, the arrow is facing the other direction as the verb is what happens to the object. This is a simple sentence in the present simple. Tenses can be changed simply by using ‘be’ in its different tenses.

The Passive Voice in the Different Tenses

                                                            will have been being

                                                            will have been

                                                            will be being

`                                                           are going to
                                                           
                                                            will be

Cars                                                     are                                            stolen.

                                                            are being

                                                            have been

                                                            have been being

                                                            were

                                                            were being
                                                           
                                                            had been

                                                            had been being

Green indicates the future tenses, orange indicates the present tenses and red shows us the present tenses.

Task
Put these sentences into the passive voice