·
"What's the point of the passive voice? Is
it really that important?"
The answer
is , Yes! Understanding the passive voice is important. In this lesson, you'll
learn what it looks like, why it's useful .
The passive
voice is used often by native English speakers. It's a mistake to think that
it's only used in formal speech. It's also used informally, quite a bit!
·
So why should you use the passive voice?
Well there
are times when you don't want to say who or what did the action. Maybe you're
trying to avoid responsibility for something you did ,or you don't want to get
your mate into trouble ,or maybe you don't know who did the action or because
actually the object is the most important ,or the most interesting part of the
sentence. So that's the thing that the action is the most important unit on the
Passive structure.
You can use
the passive to change the focus of your sentence. To understand the passive
voice, you should know really first know the Active first…. but you
already know it, it looks like like this:
Ø The children →ate → the cake.
Subject → verb → object.
Now most
English sentences are more complicated than this but we'll start simply; The
subject does the action to the object.
Now,
imagine that you left for work in the morning ,and there was a whole cake on
the kitchen table, and when you got
home, it had completely disappeared!!! You don't know who ate it, Where is
this cake? → The cake was eaten. (by somebody) you are not sure.
So the
solution is to use the passive voice because we don't know who ate the cake, Now,
sometimes we're just more interested in the object of the sentence rather than
the subject. English speakers frequently use the passive voice.
Now some
other really common passive expressions that you already know:
We don't
say "My mother bore me on June 23rd 1989." We say “I was
born on June 23rd 1989”.
You can see
the structure of the passive voice
Verb to be
followed by→the past participle.
I
thought we only use the past participle verb in the perfect tenses!?… Yeah we do use it in the perfect
tenses and in the passive voice. If you see the be verb followed by the
past participle form, you know that this is a passive sentence.
So let's go
back to the first example to explain the form of a passive sentence. If our
active sentence is "The children ate the cake" the passive
sentence is →; "The
cake was eaten by the children" ,the object of the active sentence becomes the
subject in the passive sentence.
To make the
object of the active sentence become the subject, we actually need to change a
few things in our sentence; we need to use the passive tense and there are six
steps to turn an active sentence into a passive sentence.
Now you
might want to take a notepad out so that you can write them down as we go.
Step one
1 → Identify
the subject, the verb and the object of the active sentence.
Step two
2 → move
the object to become the new subject of our sentence.
Step
three 3 → check
the active sentence. What is the verb tense in the active sentence? This is
really important because the passive voice exists across different tenses so
you must check what tense the active sentence is in to make your passive
sentence correct. It's in the past simple, "The children ate the
cake". Good!
Step
four4 →
conjugate the verb be so that it's in the same tense as the main verb in the
active sentence. We need to change our verb to be to the past simple so
it becomes was or were; depending on the new subject and our new
subject is → “the
cake” so we can choose was, "The cake was…..".
Step
five 5 → add
the past participle of the main verb after the verb to be.
So looking back at the active sentence, the main verb is → “eat”; though it's in past
simple form but can you think of the past participle of eat? Eaten,
right?
Step six
6 → you
need to decide what to do with the subject of your active sentence.in our example
is “The children”. In the passive voice, you don't have to include the
thing that is doing the action. You can completely remove that former subject
from your sentence and that's helpful if you don't know who ate the cake or you
don't want to say who it was or you don't care - maybe it's not important, but
you can add it to the end of your sentence. with the word “By”+Subject.
ü
The cake was eaten by the children.
Let's look at THIS examples together → EX: The house was built in 1893.
Try to find the passive voice of this sentence using what you learned today in the comment section…and I will reply and correct your answers….and if you still have any question make sure to ask us down bellow .And if you found our lessons useful consider sharing it with your friends 'So you succeed together'
…GOOD LUCK!!