Passive Voice

Sometimes we say things like, "My dog was killed," or "The boy was kidnapped." But who killed my dog? Who kidnapped the boy? We aren’t sure. That’s why we use the passive voice, which emphasizes the person or thing an action was done to, not the one who did the action.

Passive voice is normally formed with to be + a past participle, as in, "Chris was shot yesterday." We can use the passive voice in any tense by changing the form of to be. For instance, we can say, "My bike was stolen" (past tense) or, "My bike is being stolen!" (present progressive tense).

When we want to include the one who performed the action in a passive voice sentence, we use the phrase "by..." after the verb. For instance, "Danny will be picked up by his mother today."

Sometimes, the verb to get is substituted for to be, as in "My cat got run over last night."