How to use the passive voice to AVOID BLAMING SOMEONE in English!

hey guys today i have a very quick and hopefully  very helpful english speaking tip to share with  

you it's about the passive voice have you  heard of using the passive voice does it  

sound kind of unnecessary and scary well it's  actually super practical when you want to avoid  

blaming someone or pointing the finger of blame  why did you do that you have other options if  

you want to be smoother socially if you want to  be diplomatic politically and if you want to be  

smart in business situations where it's  not prudent or helpful to blame someone  

then the passive voice is your friend and you  want to know how to use it the passive voice is  

often used when we don't know who did something  we don't know who the subject is so we might say  

someone did something but we can also  use the passive voice and no subject  

for example the crime was committed we could use  the pronoun someone if we don't know but then we  

have to say someone committed the crime we could  also just say the crime was committed this is  

passive voice and you'll often hear this in news  reporting so you can use the passive voice to  

express if you don't know who did something but  it's also super helpful if you don't want to blame  

someone for something for example let's say that  all of my friends went out to lunch without me  

and i was sad about it so i wanted to talk  about it with my friend and i say hey uh  

you didn't invite me to lunch this is active this  is blaming this is kind of accusing my friend of  

being rude and not inviting me or i could express  this in a more polite softer way and say i wasn't  

invited to lunch or a question why wasn't i  invited to lunch versus why didn't you invite  

me to lunch so you notice with the passive voice  we're not using a specific subject there's no you  

there is no name like jenny why didn't you invite  me to lunch uh there is no subject so we avoid  

really putting an emphasis on the subject we don't  put any emphasis on it we completely delete the  

subject and we just say i wasn't invited to lunch  versus you didn't invite me to lunch we start with  

the object i or me turns into i i wasn't invited  to lunch so we use the object first and then  

helping verb to be and then the past participle uh  so invited i was not so it's negative invited why  

so this is a good example of how you might use  this socially in order to avoid blaming someone we  

can use it in a lot of different ways like let's  say you can't find your keys and you're talking to  

your partner and you don't want to blame your  partner for losing the keys or leaving the keys  

somewhere so you don't want to say where did  you leave the keys you're always losing the keys  

maybe you can say where were the keys left  or maybe you can ask this as a question  

where were the keys left or the keys were  lost i wonder where they could be versus  

you lost the keys this is very accusatory and can  sound rude of course if you want to start a fight  

don't use the passive voice you would be much  better off using the active voice to start a fight  

but if you don't want to start a fight if you  don't want to blame someone directly then use  

the passive voice another example john ate all the  ice cream i can't believe it i wanted to eat some  

ice cream versus passive voice the ice cream was  eaten completely eaten it's gone so we don't know  

who ate the ice cream maybe we can guess but we're  avoiding blaming jon for it so i hope you can see  

how we can use the passive voice to avoid blaming  someone when we speak english now it's your turn  

i would love to invite you to create your own  example sentences in the comments we can inspire  

each other with more examples and help each other  by correcting and making sure that they're clear  

and correct examples in the comments so please  leave yours i would love to see what kind of  

examples you come up with and as always if you  would like to improve your english speaking with  

go natural english with me at gonaturalenglish.com  then you can get information about the complete go  

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explore the gonaturalenglish.com website where  you can find hundreds of free english speaking  

tips just like this one so thanks so much for  watching and i'll talk to you later bye for now