Passive voice is something I have tended to struggle with. I've got better at recognising when it should be used, and I've acquired a basic understanding of how they make writing stronger, but again, I've not been too sure why. I then came across an article that made it clear to me. By sharing the information with you, I hope it will make it a little clearer for you, too. Of course, you might already know, in which case I am, yet again, showing my ignorance and--know what--I don't care, because ignorance comes before learning and I love to learn.
Basic Definition
The technical definition is:
A sentence where the object of the sentence, or phrase, becomes the subject, either of the sentence or of the same or different phrase.
So, how do you identify the object and subject of a sentence or clause?
Generally, it's easy because the subject is the thing that is acting, and the object is the thing that is being acted on.
John (subject) opened the door (object)
This definition is more difficult (at least for me) to identify subject and object in a passive voice sentence.
The door (subject) was opened by John (the object)
John is still the person doing the action and the door is still the thing being acted on, yet because the door is the focus of the sentence it is now the subject.
Therefore I think an easier way to identify subject an object would be to look at what the focus of the sentence is - in the first sentence we are interested in what John is doing. In the second sentence we're interested in what is happening to the door.
As the article says
"The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action. In other words, the most important thing or person becomes the subject of the sentence."
In the example above, are we interested in what the door is doing, or what John is doing?
Some further examples
Adam laid his hand on John's shoulder. (Active)
Adam's hand was laid on John's shoulder (Passive)
Question: Are we more interested in what Adam is doing, or what his hand is doing?
John had kept all of Adam's love letters (Active)
All of Adam's love letters had been kept by John. (Passive)
Question: Are we more interested in Adam's love letters themselves, or that John had kept them all?
John loves Adam (Active)
Adam is loved by John (Passive)
Question: Are we interested in John or Adam?
In this case, it might appear that it doesn't matter who we're interested in because they both mean the same thing, but think of it in the context of the piece you're writing. If you're writing in John's point of view then we're interested in John. If you're writing in Adam's point of view, he wouldn't think of himself in the third person. We wouldn't write "Adam is loved by John", or even "I'm loved by John" we'd write "John loves me". John is still the focus of the sentence.
Passive voice is not always wrong, however. Sometimes it's better or even necessary. Some examples from the article are
I noticed that a window had been left open.
Every year thousands of people are killed on our roads.
All the cookies have been eaten.
My car has been stolen!
I might be making things worse, of course, but it made a lot of sense to me
I would heartily recommend you read the article because it goes into a lot more technical detail and gives better examples than John and Adam are up to right now
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