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What's Passive and Active? What's the difference?
What's Passive and Active? What's the difference?
Passive and Active are voices that you can write a sentence in.
Active voice is when the sentence presents the action being done by someone/something.
This form puts more of a focus on the person/thing that is doing the action.
Passive voice is when the sentence presents something as being affected by the action.
This form puts more of a focus on the person/thing that is receiving the action.
Here are the different ways passive is written based on which tense you want it to be in. Attention to detail!
Not using Passive voice
Not using Passive voice
Passive voice is avoided in many situations. A place where a lot of passive is used, though, is scientific journal articles.
Passive voice is not used to describe any kind of weather.
Passive voice is not used with the verbs haben, sein, werden, wissen, and kennen.
Sentences in the Passive voice are often 'converted' to sentences in the Active voice. Active voice is generally preferred over the Passive voice. There is more about this in the following subsection.
Converting Passive Voice to Active Voice
Converting Passive Voice to Active Voice
Sentences in the passive voice can be converted to sentences in the active voice by inserting 'man' to the beginning of the sentence and using some rearranging. You could treat 'man' as the English form of 'he/she/they.'
Passive version: Die Tassen werden nicht gewaschen.
The cups are not washed.
Active version: Man wascht die Tassen nicht.
He/She/They doesn't/don't wash the cups.
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