In most sentences, the subject performs an action. This is called the active voice. It's direct and clear. For example:

Maria wrote the email.

Here, Maria is the subject, and she is the one doing the writing. Simple enough. But what if we want to emphasize the email instead of Maria? Or what if we don't know who wrote it? That's when we use the passive voice.

Let's flip our active sentence into the passive voice:

The email was written by Maria.

Notice the change? The email is now the subject. It isn't doing anything; it's receiving the action. Maria, the original subject, is now at the end of the sentence. The focus has shifted from the writer to the thing that was written.

Forming the passive voice follows a specific pattern. You take the object of the active sentence (like the email) and make it the subject of the new sentence. Then, you add a form of the verb 'to be' and the past participle of the main verb.

The verb 'be' is the key. It changes to match the tense and subject. For now, we'll focus on its simplest forms, like is, are, was, and were.

The past participle is the form of a verb that usually ends in -ed for regular verbs (like cooked, cleaned, played) or has an irregular form you have to memorize (like written, seen, eaten).

Let's see this structure in action.

While the active voice is usually more direct, the passive voice is useful in specific situations. We often use it when the person or thing doing the action (the agent) is unknown or unimportant.

For example, if you come home and find your window broken, you might say:

The window was broken.

You don't know who broke it, so the agent is missing. The focus is on the window and what happened to it.

We also use the passive voice to sound more objective or formal, which is why it's common in scientific and academic writing. It shifts the emphasis from the researcher to the research itself.

The samples were analyzed.

Who analyzed them? The scientists, of course. But the important thing is the analysis, not who did it.

So, while you'll often want to write in the active voice to be clear and direct, the passive voice is a valuable tool for shifting emphasis and handling situations where the agent is unknown.