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Jan Freeman, a columnist for The Boston Globe, said that the passive voice does have its uses, and that "all good writers use the passive voice." [25] Passive writing is not necessarily slack and indirect. Many famously vigorous passages use the passive voice, as in these examples with the passive verbs italicized:
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. [1] In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. [2]
They discovered that passive voice in Mandarin is heavily dependent on the context of the sentence rather than the grammatical forms. [18] Therefore, passive voice can be marked (e.g. by the most broadly used passive marker: bèi 被 [mentioned above]) or unmarked (see the "Notional passive" section below) in both speech and writing. Those ...
The passive voice in English may appear to be in the OVS order, but that is not an accurate description. In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the oranges, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the oranges, which are the object of the verb, ate.
The passive voice is formed using the verb be (in the appropriate tense or form) with the past participle of the verb in question: cars are driven, he was killed, I am being tickled, it is nice to be pampered, etc.
The latter case is not to be confused with the passive voice, where only the direct object of a sentence becomes the subject of the passive-voiced sentence, and the verb's structure also changes to convey the meaning of the passive voice. The dative construction tends to occur when the verb indicates a state rather than an action.
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(Passive voice can also be marked in nonfinite constructions – with infinitives, gerunds and present participles – in the expected way: (to) be eaten, being eaten, having been eaten, etc.) Examples of nonfinite constructions marked for the various aspects are given below. Bare infinitive: You should have left earlier.