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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome back to Shaw English.
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My name is Mike.
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And today, I'm going to continue teaching you about the active and passive voice and
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when and how to use it.
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Now, I know this can be quite challenging,
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but I know you're also doing your best and you're doing a good job.
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Make sure you stay until the end of the video because you will have homework and a quiz.
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Are you ready to get started?
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All right, let's do it.
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One of the main reasons why we use passive voice is because we want to emphasize
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the receiver instead of the doer.
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For example, “Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.”
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In this sentence, which is an active voice,
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Leonardo is our focus, the painter.
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The Mona Lisa, the painting, is the receiver.
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We want to switch them to where now the receiver is in the beginning sentence and the doer is at the end.
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So now our sentence is, “The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo DaVinci.”
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Our focus is now on the receiver, the Mona Lisa, rather than the painter, Leonardo DaVinci.
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Another reason that we change the sentence to the passive voice, is because we do not
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know the doer of the action.
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For example, “Somebody stole my cell phone.”
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I do not know who.
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So instead, I can express this in the passive voice.
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“My cell phone was stolen.”
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And again, since we don't really know who did it,
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we want to focus more on the phone instead.
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“My phone was stolen.”
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Another reason to use the passive voice could be the doer is just not that important.
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For example, “The company was founded in 1955.”
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We may or may not know who founded the company, but is not important.
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What is important is that the company was founded in 1955.
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Also, “The house was built in 1955.”
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We may or may not know who built the house.
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But again, it's not important.
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What is important is the house was built in 1955.
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Another reason to use the passive voice is because
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sometimes we don't want to blame or say someone is responsible for something.
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For example, “Mistakes were made.”
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Now, mistakes were made by someone,
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but we don't want to blame that person.
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We don't want to say it is their fault. So instead,
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we just leave them off and say,
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“Mistakes were made.”
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Another reason to use the passive voice is because
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the doer is not a specific person.
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For example, “English is spoken in many countries around the world.”
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We could add “by many people”
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but because it's a really an unspecified group of people,
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we kind of just leave it off because it's not very necessary.
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And the last reason why we use passive voice,
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is for academic writing.
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Whenever you're doing academic writing, such as essays or articles,
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we want to make it as least personal as possible
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and as professional as possible.
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“I interviewed three people.”
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Well you can see we have the pronoun 'I'.
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Well we don't want to use that.
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We want to switch the sentence over to the passive voice.
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“Three people were interviewed.”
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I could say “by me”
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but again, we want to take out the 'I' and 'MEs' make it less personal as possible
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and just have “Three people were interviewed.”
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Let's move on.
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Awesome job, everyone.
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I know you did such a great job. And I know it was tough.
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But you did it.
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You now have a basic understanding of the how and when to use the passive voice.
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But you're not done.
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You have a little bit of homework to do.
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“The teacher graded the homework.”
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I want you to take this sentence, change it into the passive voice, and put it in the comments.
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Also you have a quiz.
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In the description, you will find a link to the quiz.
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If you really like this video, make sure you hit the like button, and also subscribe to see more lessons taught by me.
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And until then, I'll see you all later.
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Bye.
