PASSIVE SENTENCE

Passive Form

In passive sentences, the thing receiving the action is the subject of the sentence and the thing doing the action is optionally included near the end of the sentence. You can use the passive form if you think that the thing receiving the action is more important or should be emphasized. You can also use the passive form if you do not know who is doing the action or if you do not want to mention who is doing the action.

Why is the passive difficult to understand and use?

In my opinion, there are a few difficult things for students to deal with when studying the passive:

1) The complicated form – it is hard to manipulate sentences using the passive in different tenses and after modal verbs. This is because of all the different auxiliary verbs and past participles used to make passive structures.

2) Understanding how and why the passive is used. Many students say they know how to construct passive sentences, but don’t know when they should use them.

3) The pronunciation of passive forms – it can be difficult to hear all the little words used when native speakers use passive forms. Also, it’s difficult to pronounce them correctly if you’re not a native speaker.

What's the difference between active and passive forms?

To understand passive forms, we need to compare them to active forms.

Active sentences are in this structure:

SUBJECT/AGENT – VERB – OBJECT

E.g. Michael Jackson – wrote – this song

The subject is the agent (the thing that ‘does’ the verb)

The agent is included because it is important, or is the topic of the sentence (e.g. if the question is “who wrote this song?” it is important to say “Michael Jackson wrote it”)

But sometimes it is better to order the sentence in a different way. Like this passive sentence:

SUBJECT – VERB - (PREPOSITION + OBJECT/AGENT)

E.g. The song – was written – (by Michael Jackson)

What is the form of passive structures?

The basic form is: be + past participle

The auxiliary verb be can come in many forms, eg. being, been, was, were, am, are, is

Past participles are the 3rd form of a verb. E.g. eat - ate - eaten. Past participles are sometimes difficult to remember.

The agent (the one who 'does' the action of the verb) is often not included.

If the agent is included, you have to use a preposition (by).

Why is the passive used?

They are used a lot, and they are useful. But, why? and how?

Here’s a list of reasons why the passive is used:

• The agent is unknown (The diamond was stolen at midnight last night - at the moment, we don't know who the thief is)
• The agent is not important (The diamond had been valued at over £1o million it's not important who valued the diamond, we can assume it was an expert)
• The agent is obvious (“The thief was arrested” -obviously it was the police because they usually do that)
• The action (the verb) is more important than the agent (the one who did it) “The door had been smashed, the cabinet was broken into and a guard was killed”
• The diamond is the topic of the sentence or story, so it is put at the beginning of the sentence

SOURCE :

https://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/activepassive.html

https://www.londonschool.com/blog/passive-verb-forms/