Using PASSIVE in English to avoid responsibility

Hi, my name is Emma, and today we will be talking about using the passive voice and

the active voice.

So what this lesson is going to do is it's going to look at, first of all, what is the

difference between the passive and the active voice, something that a lot of ESL students

do have problems with, and then we're going to look at how they are used, and when to

use them.

So this lesson is really going to focus on how businesses can use the active and passive

voices, how governments use them, and which ones will your teachers prefer when you write

essays or when you write different written assignments.

Okay, so let's get started.

So first of all, I have here a sentence, "I ate cake."

"I ate cake" is an example of the active voice.

Most sentences you see are examples of the active voice.

What it is, is you have a subject, "I", you have the verb, the action, "ate", and then

for a lot of sentences, you have the object, in this case, "cake".

So what is an active voice?

What does it do?

Well, it's where the subject does the action.

Who ate the cake?

I ate the cake.

Who did the action?

I did the action, okay?

So now let's compare this to the passive voice.

So here in this example, we have most of the same structures.

We have the "cake", so "cake, cake".

We have the verb, "to eat", but now we have the verb, "to be", "was".

So this is an example of the passive voice, okay?

So the cake was eaten.

Now how do we make the passive voice?

Well, we take the passive subject.

What does that mean?

Well, in this case, the cake is not doing the action.

In the first case, we say, "I am doing the action."

In the second sentence, we don't know who's doing the action.

We just know that the object of the action, the cake, is being eaten.

So we've sort of taken away the subject.

There is no "I" in this sentence.

You don't know who's eating the cake.

So in order to make the passive, here is our formula.

We take the passive subject, so in this case, that's the cake, the cake in the first sentence.

We take "to be", so "was", and the past participle, which in this case is "eaten".

Now for the active voice and the passive voice, it's very important to remember that we can

use this with so many different tenses.

So for example, we can use it with the present perfect, the future.

The main thing to remember is the passive voice always has "to be", past participle.

So we're going to go into more detail now about how the passive voice and the active

voice are used, and go through more examples of both voices.

Look at how we can use the passive and the active.

So here is a comparison chart.

On the one side, we have the active voice, so notice we have a subject, "I", "we", "we",

whereas on the passive, we have "be", "was", "were", "will be".

So just take a second, look at the differences between these sentences.

They have the same meaning, it's just the emphasis is on something different.

So read both sides of the chart, and just think about it for a second.

Okay, so first of all, like I said before, in the active, we have the subject, "I made

a mistake."

So in this case, when I say "I made a mistake", I'm taking responsibility for doing something.

Now this is a strong sentence, in general, in English, we prefer to use the active.

So for your teachers, for most essays, for most of your work you're doing, your teacher

would prefer a strong sentence where you do have a subject and a verb like this.

Now where this is not the case is when we're trying to avoid taking responsibility for

something, when we don't want to take the blame for something we did.

So if you think about businesses and governments, this is where this comes in, okay?

Governments hate saying they did something wrong.

They hate doing that, and so if your president of your country said, "Listen guys, I made

a mistake.

I lost a whole bunch of money."

The citizens would be really angry.

So instead, what governments do, they change it to the passive.

Instead of me taking responsibility for making a mistake, now I say simply, "A mistake was

made."

Who made the mistake?

It's unclear.

We haven't said who made the mistake.

In this case, we're trying to shy away from that.

We don't want to suggest who made that mistake.

"A serious mistake was made."

Okay?

Similarly, in war, governments, armies, they often kill a lot of people.

So if a government said, "We killed a lot of people today," they probably would not

be re-elected.

It would not be something nice for them to say.

They would become unpopular.

So how do they change this around?

Well, they take away their responsibility.

They say, "A lot of people were killed."

Who killed them?

We don't know.

Just, "A lot of people were killed."

So you see, again, we're taking away the responsibility, the blame of someone.

Businesses also love to use this.

Any time a business is going to do something that's probably going to anger you, they don't

want to take responsibility for it.

So for example, maybe you didn't pay your bills, and so as a result of that, you owe

the hydro company a lot of money, and they want to tell you they're going to shut off

your electricity.

Instead of saying, "We will turn off your electricity", if you say that "we", you're

going to get angry at the company.

They avoid the "we".

Instead, they say, "Your electricity will be turned off."

Who turned it off?

I don't know.

It's just going to be turned off.

So again, in terms of the passive, we're focused on the actual action itself.

We're not focused on who did the action.

Who did the action, we're either trying to hide who did the action, or it doesn't matter.

Or, alternatively, oftentimes with newspapers, we use the passive, and the reason is sometimes

when crimes are committed, you don't know who did the crime.

So if you don't really know who did something, the passive is the way to go.

So maybe in this case, there was a murderer who murdered a lot of people, they don't know

who did it, a newspaper might use this as well.

A lot of people were killed.

Who killed the people?

We don't know.

So to sum up, active voice is better for essays, for regular writing, because it's stronger,

it's not vague, it's not unclear, and you're saying specifically who did something.

The subject is important, whereas with the passive, this is the tricky one.

This is the one that governments love to use, and business people like to use.

So for more practice on this, I invite you to come visit our site at www.engvid.com.

We have a quiz there.

I invite you to do this quiz.

So until next time, take care.