A Guide To Learn English Language

In Eng­lish gram­mar voice plays an impor­tant role. Voice helps us to describe the rela­tion­ship between an action or a state which is expressed by a verb and other parts of the sen­tence like sub­ject, object etc. So let us learn about basics of voice.

Before going into the actual dis­cus­sion, let’s first define two forms of verbs.

Action Verbs:

Action verbs tell what the sub­ject does in a sen­tence. The action can be either observed by the senses or men­tally felt.

Exam­ple: drive, run, enjoy (observed by the senses)

Study, think (men­tally felt)

Link­ing verbs:

They are sim­ply used to join the sub­ject and the pred­i­cate. Remem­ber that pred­i­cate is the part of a sen­tence con­tain­ing a verb and stat­ing some­thing about the subject.

The most com­mon link­ing verbs include: is, be, look, grow, seem, smell, remain, appear, sound, stay, look, taste, turn and become.

He is a good student.

In the above sen­tence, he is the sub­ject and ‘a good stu­dent’ is a pred­i­cate. These two are con­nected by a link­ing verb ‘is’.

Defin­ing voice:

Along with relat­ing to time through tense, action verbs in a sen­tence, also show whether the sub­ject per­forms the action or receives the action, known as the verb’s voice. Accord­ingly, the sen­tence is declared to be either in active voice or pas­sive voice respec­tively. Note here that the link­ing verbs do not show voice.

1. A verb is active when the sub­ject per­forms the action.

I took the boy to school. (‘I’, the sub­ject is doing the action)

2. A verb is pas­sive when its action is per­formed upon the subject.

The boy is taken to school. (‘The boy’ is a sub­ject. Action is done upon him).

Although the usage seems sim­i­lar, there is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in terms of context-sensitivity. Active voice is used in the cases of more direct and force­ful. By force­ful, it means that it refers much to the sub­ject. But pas­sive voice is used in cases where the sub­ject is given less ref­er­ence (or even omitted).

The usage of pas­sive voice is prefer­able under two conditions:

• When one doesn’t want to assign blame on the subject.

The project has been in vain.

• The sub­ject of the action is not exactly known.

A prank SMS arrived at 3:00 A.M.

It is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered a rule not too much use of the pas­sive voice. Stu­dents are rec­om­mended not to frame sen­tences in pas­sive voice in their aca­d­e­mic write-ups.

The pas­sive voice is a kind of polite expres­sion .We encounter sit­u­a­tions where the usage of pas­sive voice is appro­pri­ate and even essen­tial. The Con­text decides in most cases what appro­pri­ate voice to be used.