Name: What's the passive voice? Ask BBC Learning English
Uploaded: 2025-11-16T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 2 min 37 s
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To-infinitive

Modal verbs - A2

{Can you tell me about the passive voice?}

That was Viviana's question, but we also want to hear yours.

Send us an email to learningenglish@bbc.co.uk.

So what we call the passive voice, is where you take the object of an active sentence, "I wrote the letter."

and you make it the subject of a new passive sentence.

We're not focusing on the person who wrote the letter; we're focusing on the letter itself.

A lot of formal writing is about actions and often it doesn't matter who does them.

So you're likely to find a lot of passives.

In formal writing, the chemicals are mixed together.

Varying the order in which information appears in a sentence can help make your writing flow better.

We can use the passive to make a sentence link better to the one that comes before it,

and this can help make your paragraphs clearer.

Sometimes it doesn't matter who the subject is, and sometimes, we just don't know who they are.

Sometimes people use the passive to hide the fact they've been dishonest.

No, I'm afraid the sweets have all been eaten, so you can't have any.

And that's important because we can actually use it in lots of different tenses to make a passive.

Usually, we use "be" in the appropriate tense and the past participle.

Now, there are some verbs which we don't use in the passive, intransitive verbs and some state verbs.

You can find more information on the topic below.