In English, as in many other languages, the passive voice is a grammatical voice in which the subject receives the action of a transitive verb. Passive voice emphasizes the process rather than who is performing the action. Passive (or passive verb[1]) refers more generally to verbs using this construction and the passages in which they are used. In English, a passive verb is periphrastic; that is, it does not have a one-word form, but consists of an auxiliary verb plus the past participle of the transitive verb. The auxiliary verb usually is a form of the verb to be, but other auxiliary verbs, such as get, are sometimes used. The passive voice can be used in any number of tenses. The process of changing an active verb into a passive one is called passivization. Passivization is a valence-decreasing process, and it is sometimes referred to as a detranzitivizing process, because it changes transitive verbs into intransitives.
In the following passage from the Declaration of Independence, the passive verbs are bolded, while the active verb hold and the copulative verb are are italicized:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
One can still introduce the actor of a passive verb using a by phrase - as in the example above. When such a phrase is missing, the construction is called an agentless passive. Agentless passives are sometimes preferred in official writing because they are less confrontational, for instance when announcing someone's firing. Agentless passives are also used in scientific writing, where they are intended to provide an objective description in terms of processes rather than people. Using an agentless passive, a scientist may write:
The mixture was heated to 300 °C.
without saying who actually did it, which is (or should be) irrelevant as far as the scientific process goes. This approach to scientific writing is not universally accepted, and some US organizations like the The Council of Biology Editors, have called for a more direct, active voice approach. Another entrenched use is the double passive construction used in American court reporting.
The active voice is the dominant voice in English at large, and many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged that the use of the passive voice should be minimized. However, there is general agreement that the passive is useful when the receiver of the action is more important than the doer.
