Grammar Zone | Active Voice vs. Passive Voice

In this episode of The A to Z English Podcast, Xochitl and Jack explain the difference between the active voice and the passive voice. Transcript: 00:00:01 Jack Welcome to the A-Z English podcast. My name is Jack and I'm here with my co-host social. And today we are stepping into the grammar zone and we're going to talk about the active voice versus the passive voice. And so social when we use the active voice, that's. 00:00:20 Jack Tends to be our typical like subject, verb, object, sentences, right? 00:00:25 Xochitl Yes. 00:00:26 Jack Yeah, like the cat chased the mouse. The cat is the subject. Chased is the verb and then the object of the of the cat's interest. What the cat is chasing is the mouse. 00:00:43 Jack What if we? 00:00:44 Jack Put that into the passive voice. Uhm, where we kind of basically the subject and the object are inverted. Uh, kind of reversed. 00:00:56 Jack So for example, the mouse was chased by the cat. Can you think of like a reason why we might use that kind of construction, a passive voice? 00:01:10 Xochitl The mouse was chased by the cat. 00:01:13 Jack Yeah. 00:01:14 Jack I was thinking. 00:01:15 Jack Like we want to emphasize the the mouse instead of the cat, right? 00:01:19 Jack We're kind of emphasizing that, yeah, because it's like technically it's the object of the of the sentence in the active, you know, the cat chased the mouse. But if we want to emphasize the mouse, we can flip it around and use the passive voice. The mouse was chased by the cat. 00:01:19 Xochitl Yeah, I was going to say. 00:01:21 Xochitl Too again. 00:01:39 Jack And I wanted to throw one more thing at you here. Like there's another reason sometimes we use the passive voice and and it's when the subject is unknown. 00:01:51 Jack So. 00:01:52 Xochitl Ohh. 00:01:53 Jack Can you think I I was thinking of an example like imagine you're, uh, you wake up in the morning, you go. I know you don't drive, but this is a hypothetical situation. You go out, you you grab your keys, you go out to your your front front yard and your car's gone. 00:02:13 발표자 MHM. 00:02:13 Jack So we could use, you know, the active voice and we could say someone stole Social's car, but we often don't use the pronoun someone instead of instead you would come back in the house and say, oh, my gosh, my car was stolen. 00:02:33 Xochitl Yep, Yep. 00:02:33 발표자 That's. 00:02:34 Jack Yeah. 00:02:36 발표자 Yeah. 00:02:37 Jack And in the full sentence would be my car was stolen by somebody. But in this case we. 00:02:43 Jack Just the the. 00:02:44 Jack Subject is unknown. We don't know who it is. 00:02:46 Xochitl I think sometimes we do. We might come in and be like someone. 00:02:49 Xochitl Stole my car though. 00:02:50 Jack Yes, yes, we will say that. Yep. 00:02:54 Xochitl Yeah. So I think that's where that would come. 00:02:55 Xochitl Into play. 00:02:56 Jack Yes, yes, I and and again this this is the the whole point of like active and passive voice is that you get to choose the style that you and tone that you want to use I think. 00:03:08 Jack This is. That's why I'm not like a a huge fan of teaching this kind of grammar to my students who are beginners because they it just confuses them. But for students that are like a little bit higher level and want to make their writing a little bit more interesting, I think the passive voice. 00:03:17 발표자 So. 00:03:29 Jack Can be a useful a useful tool, but but it's definitely not necessary. Definitely not necessary. You could just say someone stole my car, yeah. 00:03:40 Xochitl Yes. 00:03:41 Jack Yeah. 00:03:43 Jack And umm, I'm also thinking like in the newspaper. Uh, this is very common in like headlines. 00:03:51 Jack Am I wrong about that? I'm thinking like. 00:03:55 Xochitl Like. 00:03:58 Xochitl Like, yeah, like yes, because you would say an office building was burned down by 27 year old male instead of a 27 year old male burned in an office building or something. 00:04:06 Jack Yes, exactly.