In English language, speech could be active, in this case, the person or the thing that does the action exists at the beginning of the sentence and this is called an active voice, however, if you want to focus on the thing that happened or the receiver of the action (object) you must use what we called the passive verbs.
active and passive voice frequency.
most of the common phrases that are used in everyday conversations are in the active voice. nearly al the time we know who is talking and what is he/she doing. most informal conversations in streets, homes, or with family and friends contain active voice sentences.
However in informal situations like formal letters, business writing, documents, and legal actions we tend to find the passive voice more commonly used there.
active voice meaning
An active sentence often begins with a subject example ( Ali - Ahmad - He- we - she - it - the school etc.)
this is an example of an active voice sentence: Ahmad sent an email to IBM.
we know who sent the e-mail to IBM ( Ahmad ) thus we can say that the subject or the person who did the action was Ahmad.
passive voice meaning
A passive voice sentence often begins with the object which could be a person or something.
example The e-mail was sent to IBM.
in this passive example, we don't know who sent the e-mail to IBM, we only know that the e-mail was sent and that is the important keywords here are ( e-mail - IBM ) so what exactly are the usages of passive?
The passive voice rules
to change a sentence from active to passive we need to apply these rules as follows:
1- delete the subject from the beginning of the sentence
2- being with the object ( place it at the beginning of the sentence )
3- change the tense of the sentence from active to passive tense
passive voice grammar rules
simple present passive
in the simple present, we use subject + verb infinitive or subject + verb + s,es,ies examples:
we go to school every day.
she goes to work at 8.
to change the simple present from active to passive we follow the rules above, let's take the first sentence.
we go to school every day. let's delete the subject ( we). and then we are going to begin with the object (Work). after this, we have to determine the tense which is here ( present simple ).
to change the present simple tense from active to passive we use
object+am-is-are+ verb ( past participle)
work is gone every day
work is the object we began with
because (work) is singular we used (is)
the past participle of go is (gone)
the second example
she goes to work at 8. ( try to apply all the rules we mentioned ) so it will become :