Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Passive Voice. Active and Passive PDF
Passive Voice. Active and Passive PDF
We use the terms active voice and passive voice to talk about ways of organising the
content of a clause:
The active voice is the typical word order. We put the subject (the topic or the theme)
first. The subject is the ‘doer’ or agent of the verb:
In the passive, the person or thing that the action was done to becomes the topic or
theme. We can leave out the ‘doer’ or agent, or we can place the ‘doer’ in a prepositional
phrase (by + ‘doer’):
These houses were designed in the 1880s by Edward Barnes. (passive + by + agent)
We use the passive when we want to change the focus of a clause, or if the doer of the
verb is not important or not known or if we do not want to say who the doer is.