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Saturday 21 September 2013

The passive voice - using different verb tenses and forms



A colleague asked me the other day about using the passive in different verb tenses and forms and what these would look like.  Most teachers are fairly confident in using the simple present and simple past passive forms, but it is important to know what the other forms look like, especially when identifying good examples in authentic texts to use in class.   

As the passive is included in the statutory appendix of the 2014 National Curriculum and is required teaching for year 6 pupils, I thought it might be useful to post some key subject knowledge about the active and passive voices and detail the most common passive tenses and forms, with examples.

Most of the sentences we write are in the active voice.  In this structure, the subject of the sentence is the person or thing which is doing the action and the object of the sentence is what is being affected by the action.  For example:
The dog      chased       the cat.
subject               verb               object
doing the      (active form)       affected by
action                                       the action

The passive voice is formed by using a form of the verb ‘be’ and the past participle of the main verb.  In the passive, the person or thing being affected by the action becomes the subject of the sentence; the person or thing doing the action may or may not be provided.  For example:
The cat        was chased.
subject          verb (past passive form)
affected
by action
The cat        was chased          by the dog
subject                     verb                       preposition + the agent
affected         (past passive form)         doing the action
by action

Below are examples of different tenses and verb forms in the passive, using the main verb ‘fly’.  The list isn’t exhaustive, but provides the most common variations and a few less usual ones.

She is flown.                                             Simple present passive
She was flown.                                          Simple past passive
She is being flown.                                     Present continuous passive
She was being flown.                                 Past continuous passive
She has been flown.                                  Present perfect passive
She had been flown.                                  Past perfect passive
She will be flown.                                      Simple future passive
She is going to be flown.                           Simple future passive (is going to)
She will be being flown.                             Future continuous passive
She is going to be being flown.                   Future continuous passive (although I find this an ugly structure)
She has been being flown.                         Present perfect continuous passive
She had been being flown.                         Past perfect continuous passive
She will have been flown.                           Future perfect passive
She is going to have been flown.                 Future perfect passive
She could have been flown.                       Conditional present perfect passive
She would have been being flown.              Conditional present perfect continuous passive

It will be important for children to understand that we use the passive to create more formality in writing and that it is often used to distance the writer from the content being presented.  In some cases this enables the writer to ‘hide’ responsibility.  For example, the omission of the agent in the sentence below would hide who to blame or to thank, depending on your point of view and occupation.  (Although for many teachers I know, this would be a shorter working day!)

‘It has been decided to extend the school day to 9.00 pm.’

Of course, when writing, we may not know who the agent is and cannot include this information in our sentence.  For example, in journalistic writing, the perpetrator of a crime may not be known: The statue was damaged last night, at around ten.

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