active voice and passive voice structures
Answers
Active and Passive voice: Words come together to form a sentence and these sentences can be formed in more than one way. The way these sentences are made make a lot of difference in writing and we are going to learn all about that in this chapter. One thing to note here is that no matter what the structure of the sentence is, the meaning of the sentence does not change. That’s actually a very important point to remember throughout this chapter. Keep it in mind. Let’s dive straight into the realm of Active and Passive voice.
Active and Passive Voice:
that every subject has a subject, a verb, and an object. A subject is an agent who performs the verb on the object. Let’s understand this with the help of an example:
- I swim in the ocean. – I is the subject, swim is the verb, and ocean is the object.
- My mom plays violin. – My mom is the subject, plays is the verb, and violin is the object.
Active voice: When a subject is directly acting on the object, the sentence is written in Active voice.
Passive voice: When the object is acted upon by the subject, the sentence is written in Passive voice.
In both the above sentences, the meaning remains the same and only the structure is what that changes. Usually, the structure or sequence of the subject, verb, and object expressed in the active voice sentence gets reversed in the passive voice of the same sentence.
Structure of Active and Passive voice:
Active voice: Subject + Verb + Object
Passive voice: Object + Verb + Subject
You must have seen that the verb form changes when you switch from active to passive voice. Now verbs used are of two kinds: the main and the auxiliary verbs. Usually, an auxiliary verb is accompanied by the main verb. The auxiliary verb like be, do or have shows the tense or mood of the verb. For example, in the sentence “I have finished my scuba diving course in the Havelock Islands”, finished is the main verb and have is the auxiliary verb.
Rules for changing Active voice to Passive voice:
Simply exchange the places of the subject and the object. The subject should become the object and vice-e-versa while changing a sentence from Active to Passive voice or reverse.
- Active voice: She bought a new car. (She is the subject and a new car is an object.)
- Passive voice: A new car was bought by her. (A new car is a subject and her is the subject and her is the object.)
Present tense–
Active voice: Sun rises from the east.
Passive voice: East is where the sun rises from.
Past tense–
Active voice: She walked my dog home.
Passive voice: My dog was walked home by her.
Future tense–
Active voice: Sheena will do the craft work.
Passive voice: Craft work will be done by Sheena.