When To Use passive voice

1. To emphasise the person or thing that is acted upon.

• Builders completed the Petronas Twin Towers in 1998.

(Active - draws too much attention to the builders. Everyone knows that builders are the ones who complete towers. You don’t need to highlight that unless you have a particular reason to do so.)

• The Petronas Twin Towers were completed in 1998. (Passive)

• The heavy rain destroyed the temporary bridge. (Active - If you want your reader to focus on the heavy rain)

The temporary bridge was destroyed by the heavy rain.(Passive - if you want your reader to focus on the bridge)

The trainer was training the school’s new athlete as a gymnast. (Active - That active sentence sounds awkward. It draws too much attention to the person doing the training, when it would be more reasonable for this sentence to focus on the athlete. The active voice also forces the phrase “as a gymnast” to be separated from “training.” Which makes the whole thing kind of confusing.)

The school’s new athlete was being trained as a gymnast. (Passive)

2. When you don’t know who committed the action or when writing reports of crimes or incidents with unknown perpetrators.

• My car was stolen near the Post Office at Jalan

Kuching.

You could write something like “Someone stole my car near the Post Office at Jalan Kuching” but that doesn’t add any information.

In the example above, the focus is on the fact that my car was stolen. We do not know, however, who did it. Sometimes a statement in passive is more polite than active voice.

• A mistake was made.

In this case, it focusses on the fact that a mistake was made, but no one was blamed. In addition, you would probably want to be vague about who is responsible.

• The cave paintings were made during the Stone Age. (We don’t know who made them.)