Passive Voice in English: When to Use It (and When to Drop It)

If you’ve ever written a sentence, deleted it, and rewritten it three times because it “sounded weird,” there’s a decent chance the passive voice was the culprit — either because you used it when you shouldn’t have, or because you avoided it when it was exactly what the sentence needed. It’s one of those grammar points that even C1 and C2 learners get wrong, not because the rule is hard, but because nobody explains when to use it, only how.

Here’s the short version: the passive voice isn’t a mistake, and it isn’t “bad English.” It’s a tool. Used well, it makes your writing clearer. Used by accident, it makes it vague, wordy, and a little evasive. Let’s fix both problems.

How the Passive Voice Is Actually Built

Every passive sentence uses the same two ingredients: a form of to be, plus the past participle of the main verb.

• Present simple: The reports are checked every morning.
• Past simple: The reports were checked yesterday.
• Present perfect: The reports have been checked.
• Future: The reports will be checked tomorrow.
• Modal: The reports must be checked before 5pm.

Notice the pattern: whatever tense the active sentence was in, the passive keeps that same tense on the verb “to be,” and the main verb switches to its past participle form. If you can conjugate “to be” in a tense, you can make that tense passive.

The One Rule That Decides If a Sentence Can Even Go Passive

Only transitive verbs — verbs that take a direct object — can be made passive. “She painted the house” has an object (“the house”), so it becomes “The house was painted.” But “She arrived at noon” has no object; “arrive” is intransitive, so there’s no passive version of it. If you’re ever unsure whether a sentence can go passive, ask yourself: what noun is receiving the action? No receiving noun, no passive.

Four Times the Passive Voice Is the Right Choice

This is the part most textbooks skip. The passive voice earns its place in exactly four situations.

1. The action matters more than who did it

This is why scientific and technical writing leans on the passive so heavily: “The sample was heated to 80°C” tells you what happened without wasting words on who did the heating. Nobody cares which lab technician held the beaker.

2. You don’t know — or don’t need to say — who did it

“My car was stolen last night.” You don’t know who took it, so naming an agent is impossible. Compare that to “The suspect was arrested this morning” — you could add “by the police,” but it’s so obvious that spelling it out would just be clutter.

3. You want to be tactful (or avoid blame)

“The vase was broken” quietly avoids pointing a finger. Compare it to “You broke the vase.” Same facts, very different tone. Native speakers use this trick constantly in emails and meetings: “An error was made in the invoice” lands much softer than “You made an error in the invoice,” even when everyone knows exactly whose error it was.

4. You want to put the important thing first

English likes to open a sentence with what it’s “about.” “The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci” keeps the famous painting as the subject, which is usually what the sentence is actually about — not Leonardo. If the context is a biography of Leonardo, you’d flip it back to active: “Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.”

When to Go Back to Active (Which Is Most of the Time)

Outside those four situations, active voice wins almost every time, because it’s shorter, more direct, and easier to follow. Compare:

• Passive: “A decision was made by the manager to postpone the meeting.” (12 words)
• Active: “The manager decided to postpone the meeting.” (7 words)

If you notice you’re writing a lot of sentences like the first one — especially in emails or spoken English — it’s usually a sign of translating too literally from your own language, or of trying to “sound more formal.” Formal doesn’t have to mean passive. Clear and active is almost always the more professional choice in English.

Quick Practice: Fix These Five Sentences

Try rewriting each one in the voice that actually fits the situation, then check your instinct against the explanation after it.

• “The window was broken by me.” → You know who did it and there’s no reason to hide it, so go active: “I broke the window.”
• “Someone stole my phone at the party.” → The thief is unknown, so passive fits better: “My phone was stolen at the party.”
• “They are building a new airport in the city.” → If the builders don’t matter, passive works well: “A new airport is being built in the city.”
• “The results were analyzed by our research team.” → In a report, keep it passive — the focus is the results, not the team.
• “A mistake was made.” → Tactful, but if you’re the one who made it and you’re apologizing sincerely, active (“I made a mistake”) often sounds more honest.

The passive voice isn’t a trap to avoid or a rule to memorize for an exam — it’s a lens you can pick up and put down depending on what you want your sentence to focus on. Once you start noticing it in the English you read every day (news articles are full of it), you’ll stop guessing and start choosing.

If you want to actually hear how native speakers slide between active and passive in real conversation — and get corrected gently when you don’t quite stick the landing — that’s exactly the kind of thing a 1-on-1 lesson is good for. You can take a free level test or book a trial lesson with one of Parlazo’s native English teachers whenever you’re ready.