Voice
Voice is a grammatical category that describes the relationship between the verb and its subject. English has two voices: active (the subject performs the action) and passive (the subject receives the action).
Form
| Voice | Structure | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Subject + verb + object | The committee approved the proposal. |
| Passive | Subject + be + past participle (+ by agent) | The proposal was approved (by the committee). |
The passive is formed with be + past participle, but also occurs with get (He got promoted), particularly in informal spoken English. Only transitive verbs can be passivised.
Why Speakers Choose Passive
The passive is not merely a "transformation" of the active. It serves distinct communicative functions:
- Agent deletion — when the agent is unknown, obvious, or deliberately concealed: Mistakes were made.
- Topic management — keeping the topic in subject position across sentences: The bridge was built in 1890. It was designed by...
- End-focus — placing new or heavy information at the end: The award was presented by the President himself.
- Formality and impersonality — characteristic of academic and scientific Register: The samples were analysed using...
- Objectivity — removing human agency to present findings as factual: It has been demonstrated that...
Frequency and Register
Passive voice frequency varies dramatically by Genre:
- Academic prose: ~25% of finite verbs are passive (Biber et al., 1999)
- Conversation: ~2% passive
- News reporting: moderate use, often for information packaging
Teaching: When and Why, Not Just How
A persistent problem in ELT is teaching passive as a structural exercise ("Change these sentences to passive") without addressing the discourse motivations. Learners need to understand:
- When passive is the natural choice (agent unknown, topic continuity, register demands)
- Why it sounds odd in some contexts ("A good time was had by all" — forced and unnatural in most situations)
- How it interacts with Thematic Structure — passive allows the writer to choose which participant becomes the theme of the clause
The common prescriptive advice to "avoid passive voice" in writing is misleading. In academic writing especially, passive is a functional tool, not a stylistic weakness.