Lesson travel agencies reading: Travel agencies Grammar: Active and passive

Grammar ACTIVE AND PASSIVE

Active and Passive Voices are the two ways of expressing an action taken by a subject on an object. Meaning of the sentence either in active or passive voice doesn’t change except few structural changes. Kindly go through the below example-Active Voice- I draw a sketch.

Active Voice is the most direct and effective way to convey the information. It a simply starts with the Subject (in this case ‘I’who performs the action) followed by the Verb (action)-‘draw’ and then the Object (on whom the action is performed)-sketch. Active Voice is expressed in the simple form of – Subject + Action (Verb) + Object.
Now go through the Passive Voice of the above Active Voice statement.
Passive Voice- A sketch is drawn by me.
Passive Voice conveys the same message as in Active Voice, but it does it in an indirect way. In the Passive Voice the subject becomes “Passive” and the Object gets the prominence. Like in the above Passive Sentence the subject ‘me’ is being acted upon by the object.
The meaning of both of the above sentences remains same and they have only structural differences. It’s better to know the rules and Formulae for both Active and Passive Voices, by going through Examples and Exercises.
Structural Formula
For the purpose of deriving a Structural formula for Active and Passive voice, we will study one example sentence in both the voices, written below-
Active Voice- I write a letter.
Passive Voice- A letter is written by me.
First analyze the ‘Active Voice’ statement: “I write a letter” - ‘I’ is the subject, the verb is ‘write’ and the object is ‘letter’.
Therefore, the Structural Formula for Active Voice Statement can be written as- Subject + Verb + Object
Moving on to the Passive statement: “A letter is written by me” - we realize that the Object appears first followed by the Verb and Subject respectively. Therefore, the structural formula for Passive Voice can be given as- Object + Verb + Subject.