Active voice to passive voice in English

In this English lesson you will learn how we change the active voice to passive voice.

Firstly, what is the active voice and chat is the passive voice?

Active voice

Here are some examples of active voice sentences:

• I clean my room everyday.
• Sam drank all the milk.
• John has broken the vase.

Passive voice

Here are the same sentences written in the passive voice:

• My room is cleaned everyday.
• All the milk was drunk.
• The vase has been broken.

So, how do we turn an active sentence into a passive sentence?

Well, the secret is the verb ‘to be’ and the participle form of the main verb.

Passive sentences are always formed with that verb and the participle. Another secret is that the object of the active sentence becomes the subject in the passive voice.

SVO

Remember the SVO rule – a Subject, a Verb, and an Object must be present in a sentence.

I clean my room everyday – subject = I, verb = clean, object = my room.

Therefore, to turn this sentence into the passive voice the object (my room) becomes the subject, we take the verb ‘to be’ in the same tense as the original verb (is), and the past participle of the original verb (clean – cleaned)

• My room is cleaned everyday.

The original subject of the sentence becomes the agent and is normally not necessary because it is not important to the sentence.

If you want to know who did the action you use ‘by’.

• My room was cleaned by me.

Here are the sentences from the video lesson. See if you can turn them into passive voice sentences in the comments section below. I will do the first one for you.

• Sue saw Tom talking to John. Tom was seen talking to John.
• We are meeting Tim at the airport.
• I have told Eddie about the meeting.
• A loud noise woke me up.
• She talked me into going to the cinema.
• You can find the coffee machine on the 4th floor.
• I’ll finish the report by Tuesday.

Good luck!

Here is another English lesson for you to study.

Please take a look at my courses on curious.com