#12: Mini Grammar - Passive Voice vs Active Voice

Hello my beautiful students and welcome back to English News Pod. I’m your host and teacher, Caroline. Today we are mixing things up with a mini grammar lesson!

Have you noticed my use of passive voice in my podcast episodes? In formal English, you will usually see English written in the active voice. The active voice is when a subject performs a verb. This is thought to be the most correct form of English, and is encouraged even in English-speaking universities to native English speakers. 

However, the passive voice is used when we only really care about the action that is happening, not so much about who is doing the action. For this reason, you will hear English speakers use the passive voice very often, especially while telling a story. 

So what do the active and passive voices look like? Let’s say, one day I painted a wall. The active sentence to describe this would be: “Caroline painted the wall.” This sentence can be made into a passive sentence emphasizing the action by saying, “the wall was painted by Caroline.” 

Remember, we use the passive voice because we don’t care a lot about who is performing the action. So, it is also correct to say in the passive voice simply, “the wall was painted.” In this example, I've removed the details about who painted the wall. 

That being said, most of the time, we will know who did the action. When these details are provided, it is super easy to identify a passive sentence. A passive sentence with all of the details of who did the action will always have the same format - the end will be the word “by” + the thing or person doing the verb. For example, I can say, “the wall was painted by Caroline.” Here, the person painting the wall is me, Caroline. 

The passive voice can be an extremely powerful tool as an English speaker. You can decide which details of a story to share and which details to hide. It is also a good tactic for when you don’t know all of the information in a situation. For example, sometimes you might know a wall was painted by someone, but you might not know who painted it. In this case, you can just say, “the wall was painted.” I still know the action was completed, I just don’t know who completed it - leaving this information out is ok when you use the passive voice! 

If you want to practice passive voice more, I recommend watching any crime TV series in English. Why? Because, in a crime tv show, the police often know that a crime was committed, but they need time to discover who committed the crime. The police know that a women’s purse was stolen, but they need time to find out who it was stolen by! 

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Thanks for listening, and I will see you soon for more news in English!