Passive voice verbs examples12/29/2023 ![]() Sometimes you don't actually know who did the action. This sentence is still grammatically correct, but it's longer than it needs to be and draws attention to 'people' when that's not really important. More people attended the July event than any other this year. If we wanted to say this with an active sentence, it would look like this: So it makes sense to make 'the July event' the subject and have the sentence be passive. The point of the sentence is to say that the July event was the most popular. It doesn't matter so much who attended the event. The July event was the most widely attended of the year. Take a look at the following sentence by way of example: If your sentence is more about what happened than who did it, then you're best off using the active voice. When you want to emphasize the action rather than the doer: However, there are times when the passive voice is more appropriate. It's the preferred form if you want to sound credible and you want your sentences to be straight-to-the-point. Active and Passive Voice UsageĪs a general rule, it's best to use active voice when possible. The adverbial clause 'during the pandemic' stays intact. Once you've got the subject of your sentence, swap the rest of the sentence around so the subject (dogs) becomes the object, and fix the verb to the correct form.įamilies adopted a large number of dogs during the pandemic. It could be families, households, single women, single men, and so on. But even if you didn't write it, I'm sure you can hazard a guess. If you're the one who wrote the sentence, you probably know who did the adoption. This is pretty easy to do in a simple sentence, but it can quickly get complicated.įor example, in the following sentence, who do you think is doing the action?Ī large number of dogs were adopted during the pandemic. Now what if you have a sentence in the passive form and you want to make it active? First of all, you'll want to determine who is doing the action. Notice how the present indefinite 'throws' becomes the past participle 'thrown.' And because the original sentence is in the present tense, the verb 'be' stays in the present tense. Let's try it with the following sentence: ![]() More on that later, but the simple formula is: Then, you'll need to fix the verbs a little. Say you have a sentence in the active voice, and you want to change it to the passive voice how can you do that? First, you'll need to swap the object and the subject. But only the first sentence describes the active action of the boy singing. Yes, in both sentences, the boy is singing. Instead, the direct object 'song' has become the subject. The boy has become secondary to the meaning of the sentence, or in other words, just a passive participant. In the second sentence, however, the focus is now on the song. The boy is doing the action of the verb: singing. The first sentence is in the active voice because the focus of the sentence is to talk about the boy singing. However, in a passive sentence, the subject is not actively performing the action of the verb.If the subject is the one doing the action of the verb, then the sentence is active.Okay, so you probably already know that every sentence has a subject and a verb. The active and passive voices are the only two possible voices you can use in the English language. But what exactly are they? Concluding Thoughts on Active and Passive Voice What Are the Active and Passive Voices?
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