In the grammar Study of Voices becomes one of the important part of language mastery. Before you start studying active and passive voice, there are a few basic building blocks of English grammar you need to know first. Think of these as the rules of the road before you learn how to take a car apart and put it back together.
First, you need to understand the sentence pattern, which in English almost always follows the order of Subject + Verb + Object (SVO)—meaning the person or thing doing the action comes first, followed by the action itself, and then what the action happens to.
Second, you should know the basic sentence types, particularly simple declarative statements, because turning a voice around usually happens in normal, everyday sentences rather than questions or commands.
Third is SVO agreement (or subject-verb agreement), which means the verb must always match its subject—for example, saying "The dog runs" instead of "The dog run". Fourth, you need to grasp the idea of the doer in the subject, which is simply the person or thing actively carrying out the action at the very beginning of a normal sentence.
Finally, you need to be familiar with the doer as the agent, which is what happens when you flip a sentence into the passive voice and the original doer gets pushed to the back of the sentence, often introduced by the word "by" (such as "by John"). Knowing these key concepts will make learning how to switch between active and passive sentences much easier and clearer.
Master grammatical voices with our study set covering structural formulas across tenses, modals, imperatives, and interrogatives. Then test your knowledge across 100 interactive questions divided into 10 progressive sets (3 Easy, 3 Average, 4 Difficult). Score 10/10 to unlock the victory celebration!