The passive voice reorders a clause so that the entity affected by the action becomes the grammatical subject, formed with be + past participle: The proposal was approved. It is the marked partner of the active within the broader category of Voice, and only transitive verbs can take it.
The canonical pattern is be + past participle, with be carrying tense, aspect, and modality: is taken, was taken, has been taken, is being taken, will be taken, must be taken. The colloquial get-passive substitutes get for be (He got fired, The window got broken) and tends to signal an event that is adverse, unplanned, or affects the subject's interests; it is far more common in speech than in writing (Carter and McCarthy, 2006).
The doer, when expressed, appears in a by-phrase: The samples were analysed by a technician. Crucially, this phrase is optional and most often omitted. Biber et al. (1999) find that the great majority of passives in English are agentless. The agent is dropped when it is unknown (My bike was stolen), obvious from context (She was arrested), irrelevant (The road was resurfaced), or generic (English is spoken here).
A past participle after be can describe either an event or a resulting state:
| Type | Reading | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic | An action happening | The door was opened by the porter. |
| Stative | A condition, not an event | The door was open(ed) all morning. |
Stative passives shade into adjectives (I'm interested, She was tired), which is why some be + participle strings are not true passives at all.
Passive is a tool for managing information flow, not a cosmetic alternative to the active. It supports end-focus and end-weight by pushing long or newsworthy material to the end of the clause (The prize was won by a sixteen-year-old from Hanoi), and it preserves given-before-new ordering and topic continuity across sentences. In academic and scientific registers it also lends impersonality and an appearance of objectivity (It has been shown that...).
Style guides that flatly tell writers to avoid the passive overreach. The passive is the correct choice when the affected entity is the topic, when the agent is unknown or unimportant, or when register demands impersonality. The genuine fault those guides target is the needless agentless passive that hides responsibility (Mistakes were made) or muddies clear narration; the construction itself is functional, not weak.