The passive voice: despised by teachers, maligned by editors, and misunderstood by almost everyone. For over a century, this grammatical construction has been the bogeyman of English writing ...

Use the passive voice when you don’t know who is doing an action, or to emphasise that an action is being done to something or someone, rather than focusing on who or what is doing the action.

1. The voice of the verb is distinct from its tense. Don't confuse the passive voice with the past tense. (Sentence 2 happens to be in the past tense, but 3 is not; both 2 and 3 are in the passive ...