Active and passive voice
English · Key Stage 3 · The School
Who is doing it
In ACTIVE voice, the subject does the action: "The council cut the funding." In PASSIVE voice, the subject receives the action: "The funding was cut." Notice the passive version does not have to say WHO cut it at all — that missing information is exactly what makes the passive voice useful, or evasive, depending on why it was chosen.
Converting between them
To make a sentence passive, move the object to the front, add a form of "to be", and put the original subject after "by" — or drop it entirely. "The dog bit the boy" (active) becomes "The boy was bitten by the dog" (passive), or simply "The boy was bitten" if the writer does not want to name the dog.
Why a writer chooses the passive
Science writing often prefers the passive — "the sample was heated to 80°C" — because the PROCESS matters, not who happened to be holding the flask. A company statement might use the passive to soften bad news: "mistakes were made" carefully avoids naming who made them. Both are deliberate choices about what to foreground and what to hide.
A company's statement after a factory accident could read: "We failed to maintain the machinery, and this failure caused the injury" (active, naming the company as the cause) — or: "The machinery was not maintained, and an injury was sustained" (passive, with nobody named as responsible for either). Both sentences can describe exactly the same accident. The active version puts responsibility in the reader's face; the passive version lets it disappear. Recognising which one a writer has chosen, and asking why, is a genuine analytical skill — not just a grammar exercise.