The passive voice is used when the focus is on the action or the thing it happens to, not on the person or thing doing it. It’s formed with the verb to be + the past participle of the main verb (the third form of the verb: done, sent, built, cooked).
Active: The chef cooked the meal.
Passive: The meal was cooked (by the chef).
The structure is:
Examples:
Wrong tense of “be”
Wrong form of the main verb
Forgetting “be”
Using the passive when the active is better
Too many passive sentences can make writing vague. If the doer is important, name it.
If you can answer “Who does the action?” and it’s important, you can use the active voice. If the doer is unknown or irrelevant, passive is fine.
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