The passive voice is a grammatical construction (a “voice”) in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action (the patient) rather than the performer (the agent). In the English language, the English passive voice is formed with an auxiliary verb (usually be or get) plus a participle (usually the past participle) of a transitive verb.
For example, “Caesar was stabbed by Brutus” uses the passive voice. The subject denotes the person (Caesar) affected by the action of the verb. The counterpart to this in active voice is, “Brutus stabbed Caesar”, in which the subject denotes the doer, or agent, Brutus.
A sentence featuring the passive voice is sometimes called a passive sentence, and a verb phrase in passive voice is sometimes called a passive verb.[1]English differs from languages in which voice is indicated through a simple inflection, since the English passive is periphrastic, composed of an auxiliary verb plus the past participle of the transitive verb.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice)
What difference does active and passive make? Well, for one thing, notice that in the passive sentence we don’t find out who does the action until the end of the sentence, and by moving that information to the end, we redistribute the emphasis in the sentence. Now we emphasize window by virtue of its position at the beginning of the sentence. Obviously that would be useful if we wanted for some reason to emphasize window or wanted to delay our reader’s knowledge that it was Jack who broke the window.( http://www.uhv.edu/ac/grammar/pdf/active.pdf)
Example:
My bike was stolen.
A mistake was made.
A letter was written.
It is said that women live longer than men.
Houses are built.
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