Active and passive

Some verbs are followed by an object and are referred to as transitive. Transitive verbs allow you to convey the same information in two different ways. Compare these two sentences:

Herb Gardner wrote the screenplay.
The screenplay was written by Herb Gardner.

In the first sentence we focus on the subject, Herb Gardner. The verb is active and tells us what Herb Gardner did to the acreenplay.
In the second sentence again the focus is on the subject, but this time it is the screenplay we are interested in. The verb is passive and tells us about something that was done to the screenplay. The last part of the sentence, by Herb Gardner, tells us about the agent, the means by which the screenplay got written:

Sentences that follow the pattern, subject + verb + object can usually be transformed in a similar way.

The active voice is by far the more common. The passive voice is restricted to certain specialised types of text (for example, scientific or academic) and to situations where the active would require a long-winded or awkward expression, as in the following sentence:

Several trucks were damaged by their sumps hitting rocks.

The passive is also a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for your own actions:

...and then the window got broken...

©John Seely 2008