Passive Voice To Active Voice Converter

Active and Passive voice: Words come together to form a sentence and these sentences can be formed in more than one way. The way these sentences are made make a lot of difference in writing and we are going to learn all about that in this chapter. One thing to note here is that no matter what the structure of the sentence is, the meaning of the sentence does not change. The recipient of the action is shifted to subject position. The main verb is changed by adding an appropriate form of the verb ‘be’. You can see this being done in the second sentence in the examples above. Learn to convert sentences in active voice to sentences in passive voice by taking the following quiz.

“A Grammar of Contemporary English” defines Voice as “voice is a grammatical category which makes it possible to view the action of a sentence in two ways, without change in the facts reported”. One and the same idea can often be expressed in two different ways, by means of an active, and by means of a passive construction.

1. Active Voice

Active voice is used to indicate the grammatical subject of the verb is performing the action or causing the happening denoted by the verb. With the active voice, you learn ‘who’ or ‘what’ is responsible for the action at the beginning of the sentence. In other words, the subject performs the action denoted by the verb. With help of active voice more powerful sentences can be build than passive voice.

Use of active voice:

1. Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the agent of the main verb.
2. Subject can be easily identified by asking ‘who’ or ‘what’ to the verb.
3. Sentences are short and easily understandable.

Example :
John wrote the letter.
-John (subject) performs the action denoted by the verb (write).

2. Passive Voice

In Passive voice the sentence focus on object i.e. who/what is receiving the action and not on who/what is performing the action. In passive voice, the actor of the of the verb (action) is either understood at the end of the sentence or maybe not told. The passive voice is used in writing facts, truth, lab or technical reports in which the actor is not important or unknown, but the action happening on the object is very important.

Use of passive voice:

1. It is used if it doesn‘t need to know or we don‘t know the actor performing the job.
2. In the end of the clause or sentence “by” is prefixed to know the actor performing the job.
3. It is used if we are more interested in the job than the actors who work.

Example :

The letter was written by John.
- letter receives the action denoted by the write (verb).

How to identify the active / passive voice?

Ask who/what performed the action(verb)? -- if the ‘who or what is at the beginning of the sentence, the sentence is active voice.

Example :

Jack is eating the apple.

Question will be :Who is eating the apple?
Look for the word “by”, if present it is passive voice.

Active/Passive voice using Modals:

The modal verbs consist of will, would, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must which are
used with main verbs to express ability, probability, obligation, advice etc.
To convert active voice having modal into passive voice, auxiliary verb “be” is added after modal in sentence.

Rules for Active to Passive conversion
Tense	Active voice	Passive voice
Simple Present Tense	Samsung scx 4623f v2.01.00.99. Subject + infinitive + object E.g. The grocer sells fresh vegetables.	S + to be + past participle + by object E.g. Fresh vegetables are sold by the grocer.
Present Continuous Tense	Subject + to be (is, am, are) being + present participle + object E.g. My boss is giving many assignments.	Subject + has/have + past participle + object E.g.I have taken him out.	Subject + past participle + object E.g. He built a large house.	S + was/were + past participle + by object E.g. A large house was built by him.
Past Continuous Tense	S + was/were + being + past participle + object E.gShe was cooking dinner.
Simple Future Tense	Subject + would + infinitive + object E.g. The doctor shall have examined ten patients by 10 O’clock.	S + would + be + past participle + by object E.g. Ten patients will have been examined by 10 O’clock by the doctor.