How to use the Passive: the pinnacle of English grammar.
Alright, maybe the passive is not the absolute pinnacle of English grammar, but it’s still one of the more challenging grammatical topics to discuss.
What is the ‘passive voice’?
In general, you would put the most important part of a sentence at the beginning, in the subject of that sentence, so if you want to describe who or what does something, you put that at the beginning of the sentence, as is the case here: The boy kicks the ball.
The subject of this sentence is the boy, and he’s also the person performing the action (kicks). The boy is, in this case, the grammatical agent in the sentence: the person doing the action in a sentence.
In the sentence “The girl threw the shoe.”, the girl is the subject of the sentence and the agent, as she is also the person doing the action.
Because the subject of the sentence is also the agent, we call these sentences active sentences, or the sentence is written in the active voice.
What if the person doing the action is not the most important part of the sentence and should not be put at the beginning of the sentence? We cannot simply turn the sentence around; that would create an awkward construction: *The ball kicks the boy. This construction is impossible because a ball cannot kick a boy — the ball cannot be the agent in this sentence.
To solve this problem, we can use the passive voice, as it removes the agent from the subject of the sentence. We get something like this: The ball is kicked by the boy.
We see that the agent of the sentence, the boy, is now in the object position in the sentence (at the end). The verbs have also changed: instead of using kicks, we have is kicked.
The same happens to the sentence The girl threw the shoe when it is changed into the passive voice: The shoe was thrown by the girl.
The passive voice, as such, is used when the agent of the sentence is not in the subject position of the sentence. The subject in a passive sentence does not perform the action.
When do you use the passive voice?
There are several reasons a speaker would use the passive voice, and it is used quite often (I’ve already used it several times in this article, for example).
Using the passive voice increases the formality of your language. It simply sounds more formal to say, “No correlation was found between the amount of time spent on a phone and the use of the passive.” than saying: “We did not find a correlation between the time spent on a phone and the use of the passive.”
The increase of formality is achieved by removing the agent and thus creating a somewhat objective and factual construction, resulting in a distance between the reader and the writer. So, when presenting facts, using the passive voice makes sure they are presented objectively, leaving room for the reader to draw conclusions from those facts.
How do you make passive constructions?
As a general rule, passive constructions consist of the following structure: subject + to be + past participle + agent, and the verb tense is represented by to be. Consider the following sentence:
“The vacuum cleaner was invented in 1901 by Hubert Cecil Booth.”
If we compare this sentence to our basic structure (subject + to be + past participle + agent), we see that the verb phrase consists of was + invented, meaning that to be has been changed into was (the past simple of to be).
The active equivalent of this sentence is: “Hubert Cecil Booth invented the vacuum cleaner in 1901.” What stands out is that in the passive construction, the subject of the active sentence is the object of the passive sentence (Hubert Cecil Booth), and the object of the active sentence is the subject of the passive sentence (the vacuum cleaner).
Compare the following two sentences:
A: “We have proven the existence of a strong correlation between screen time and sleep quality.”
P: “A strong correlation between screen time and sleep quality has been proven [by us].”
It would be more natural to leave out by us in the passive sentence, as that feels contrived, but I left it in for the the purpose of illustrating the way the subject and object change position.
Passive sentences require transitive verbs, which are verbs that take an object. Otherwise, there won’t be anything in the sentence that can function as the subject. Sometimes, as I did with the second example, the agent can be omitted because the sentence agent becomes clear from the context.
To illustrate this, go back to the second example. The sentence can be used in a research paper describing an analysis of the influence of screen time on sleep quality. It is safe to assume that this analysis was done by the researchers who also wrote the paper. As such, the agent in that sentence can be left out.
We cannot do this in our first example (“The vacuum cleaner was invented in 1901 by Hubert Cecil Booth.”), as it would be unclear who invented the vacuum cleaner. Note that if the context in which this sentence appears does solve this problem, it is safe to leave the agent out.
Conclusion
Using passive constructions in your language (both spoken and written) could increase the level of your work. Even though they are slightly harder to follow, they do give you the opportunity to show your language skills and increase the formality of your language. Passive constructions should be used naturally, though, and not all active sentences should be converted into passive sentences.
Want to learn more about the passive? Check out this video.
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