The passive voice

The passive voice

The normal, idiomatic and impersonal

The normal passive voice

• The passive is mainly used when the focus is on what is done (the action), and not on who does it (the agent);

• It can also be used when the agent is unknown or in formal texts to make the writing easier to understand;

• The agent is usually omitted, however it can appear and is always preceded by the preposition "by".

The idiomatic passive voice

• When there are two objects in an active sentence, there are two possible active sentences and two possible passive sentences;

• In these sentences there always is an indirect object and a direct object. The indirect object is almost always a person and the direct object a thing;

• Usually the subject of the sentence is the indirect object, however it can also be the direct object and in this case the indirect object is always preceded by the preposition "to".

The impersonal passive voice

• The Personal Passive simply means that the object of the active sentence becomes the subject of the passive sentence. This way every verb that needs an object (transitive verb) can form a personal passive;

• Verbs without an object (intransitive verbs) normally cannot form a personal passive (as there is no object that can become the subject of the passive sentence). To use this type of verb in the passive voice you need an impersonal construction (for example: "It is said...") so this passive is called the Impersonal Passive;

• The Personal Passive is more commonly used than the Impersonal Passive so this type of impersonal construction isn't very used in the English language.