PASSIVE VOICE DEFINITION

In passive sentences the subject receives the verb’s action that is denoted by the verb. There are two forms of passive voice: one of them is agentless (short) passive the other one is long passive. In the short form, the performer of the action is not identified. For example: “The mistakes were corrected.” In the long form, the object of the verb in an active sentence turns into the subject.

By using the suitable form of the verb “to be” and past participle , we form the passive voice. Especially for the cases that we don’t know the performer or the performer is unimportant, using passive voice is quite useful even thought it seems difficult to use. It is effective to use passive voice when the person or the thing that is affected by the action is more important than the performer of the action, when you don’t want to talk about the person or thing that is performing the action, when you need a smooth transition from one sentence to the next one, wen you want to emphasize an object, when your readers don’t need to know who is responsible for the action. The rule for the passive voice is:

form of “to be” + past participle = passive voice

Considering the passive voice definition; to identify the passive voice, you should look for “to be and a past participle. If you cannot see these both components, go on. You should make clear that whether the sentence describe an action or not. If it is so, look for the actor. Try to find whether it is in the grammatical subject position, at the front of the sentence or in the object position, at the end of the sentence or missing completely. Look for “by…” at the end of the sentence. (The car was washed by my father.)

You can see double passive voice sentences, as well. That means there are two passive forms in one sentences. For example; “The homework is being prepared to be handed next week.” It can be said as “Someone is preparing the homework to be handed next week.” Or “Someone is preparing the homework to hand it next week.” You need to see more examples to get a deeper understanding of Passive Voice Definition.

Passive Voice

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