Using passive voice

The passive voice is more frequent in English than in Spanish or Catalan. We use the passive voice:

1) When the action is more important than the subject (the person who does the action)

2) When the subject is obvious, unknown or not necessary: The classrooms are cleaned every day. (It’s not necessary to say who cleans the classrooms), My bike was stolen.

3) To avoid an active sentence with they, somebody, nobody….

Nobody has cleaned this room yet.

This room hasn’t been cleaned yet.

ACTIVE VOICE: The students do many exams every week

S V OBJ. ADV.

PASSIVE VOICE: Many exams are done every week by the students

S (patient) V ADV AGENT

The subject in the active sentences becomes the Agent introduced by preposition –BY (or is dropped) in the passive sentence. If the agent is a personal pronoun (subject pronoun), we must change it to an object pronoun.

The object (either direct or indirect) in the active sentence becomes the Patient Subject in the passive sentence.

...