Passive Voice

Definition

Passive voice is a grammatical construction (grammatical form) in which the subject sentence does not take action, but instead receives the action (as a receiver of the action ). The action is followed up by another agent (as a doer of the action ) who can be mentioned or not. In contrast to the active voice, the subject is directly related to the verb by acting as the actor of the action. Active sentences may be changed to passive, especially active sentences that use a transitive verb (need to be followed by a direct object).

Function

In the English language, the passive voice is a sentence whose function is often underestimated. In fact, there are several functions of the passive voice that are crucial and cannot be replaced by the active voice. If you use active when passive is needed, you gonna embarrass yourself! You can see more about the passive voice function as follows.

To explain sentences where a subject is an inanimate object

The passive voice is to explain sentences whose subject cannot do a verb. Or in short, if the subject is an inanimate object. What is meant by inanimate objects here is not only physical objects, but also abstract objects, such as thoughts, values, feelings, and the like.

To Describe an Event for which the Perpetrator is Unknown

the passive voice is to explain a sentence whose subject is not known with certainty. Due to this, the object of the final sentence has to be the subject for the sentence to be understood.

To describe an event whose object is more important than the subject

the passive voice is to describe events that focus on the object, not on the subject. This means that the object of the sentence is much more important to discuss than the subject.

This type of sentence can be found in scholarly presentations or other focused discussions. So for example, there is a meeting to review "robots with human intelligence". So the focus of the meeting was a discussion of the object "robots with human intelligence".

To Describe Two Events in One Sentence

The passive voice can be used in sentences that want to include two or more verbs. One goal: so that the sentence sounds varied. Now as an example, try to compare the two sentences below:

• Sam cook the food
• The food cooked by Sam

the two sentences above do not have a significant difference. However, for storytelling, generally, the sentence form like the second example is preferred.

Formulas

The passive voice is formed from the auxiliary verb and past participle (verb-3).

 

auxiliary verb + past participle

 

Auxiliary verbs used in passive voice can be:

• primary auxiliary verb "be" (is, are, am, was, were),
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• a combination of two primary auxiliary verbs (is/are being, was/were being, has/have been), or
• 
  
• combination of a primary auxiliary verb and modal auxiliary verb (will be, will have been)

The past participle used is a transitive verb. Past participles are obtained by adding -ed, -en, -d, -t, -n, or -ne to the base form, which is regular verbs. In the base form, it is an irregular verb, the past participle is inconsistent.

Source: https://id.pinterest.com/pin/316940892528991819/

Turning Active voice to Passive voice

Active or normal voice can be transformed into a passive voice (the process is called passivization ) with the following scheme.

The doer of the action (actor action) expressed in by-phrase in the passive voice is usually not mentioned. The term construction of sentences in the passive voice which the actor does not mention is short passive or agentless passive. The reasons are, among others, because the perpetrators of the action are unknown, unimportant or interesting, to avoid responsibility, or sentences constitute academic writing, especially those related to science (science).