The copy is being approved by Compliance as we speak.The copy has already been approved by Compliance.The copy will be approved by Compliance tomorrow.Strictly, the passive lives at the level of the clause or sentence rather than the phrase or word, so it’s more correct to talk of ‘passive sentences’ and ‘passive constructions’ than of ‘passive verbs’.Īnd it’s quite incorrect to talk about ‘passive tense’, since we can make passive constructions in any tense: In the active sentence, ‘He received a lot of criticism for his team’s copy,’ you could argue that the agent of the sentence is the one criticising the subject (In a passive-voice sentence, the subject is never the agent). Note, though, that agent and subject aren’t always the same even in the active voice.įor example, in the active sentence, ‘This shirt irons well’, the subject is ‘the shirt’ but the agent is not specified. The above example is a long passive, with the ‘by’-phrase making the agent explicit there is also such a thing as a short passive, where the agent isn’t made explicit, e.g. ‘The copy’ governs the verb as its grammatical subject, but it does not do the action which the verb describes. ‘The copy has been approved by Compliance’.If we flip this into the passive, we see that the subject is no longer the agent: In an active construction, the subject of the verb is typically the agent of the action or change of state the verb describes, e.g: It’s constructed by a combination of verbs – most basically, the auxiliary verb ‘be’ + a past participle, as in ‘The copy was approved by Compliance yesterday’. The passive in English is one of two voices, along with the active. My interest in this area long precedes my discovery of Language Log, but the Log has massively advanced my understanding and informed this post any errors that remain are of course my own.īefore looking at how people get the passive wrong, let’s run through what it is and what it looks like.

There’s a lot of one-upmanship in grammar talk, and I come only as a student of these things, not an expert.īut I do rest my thoughts on the works of the very clever people at Language Log, the web’s leading linguistics blog, which has been discussing the issue in great depth for several years, and specifically on Fear and Loathing of the English Passive by Geoffrey Pullum, Language Log co-founder and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English language. Finally, I will stop addressing you in the second person, as that could quickly get tedious. There is a kernel of truth behind the ‘avoid passive verbs’ refrain, however poorly formulated, and we must uncover that too. So in this post I will look at: what you really look like how the passive is misidentified and misunderstood and how you can be used most effectively.

Active voice vs passive voice examples