What is the passive voice?

The passive voice is a device used to leave out the 'doer' of the action and to focus on the person or thing affected by the action, or the action itself. It achieves this by changing the word order in a sentence. It also increases the formal and impersonal nature of writing, a quality that is often desirable when writing academically.

For example:

This active sentence,

Researchers observed low rates of handwashing.

can be changed to a passive construction in two ways:

Low rates of handwashing were observed by researchers;

or simply,

Low rates of handwashing were observed.

This annotated example highlights the changes from active to passive:

this ACTIVE sentence:

can become a PASSIVE sentence in several ways:

a)

b)

Here is another example of using the passive voice.

This text is from a scientific report. The passive voice is used extensively in scientific writing because information about the 'doer' is often redundant: the reader understands that the 'doer' is the researcher.