Passive Voice in English: How and When to Use It | 英文被動語態完整指南

Around 25% of all verb phrases in academic English are passive constructions — that figure comes from a 2002 corpus study by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan in their Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. For anyone writing reports, emails, or taking IELTS, the passive voice is not optional — it is the standard. Yet many learners in Taiwan treat it as an afterthought, something to memorize the night before an exam and then forget. That approach costs marks, sounds unnatural, and leaves a gap in your professional English that is hard to hide.

This guide covers every tense, every common mistake, and the four situations where passive voice is clearly the better choice — with practice sentences you can use today.

什麼是被動語態？| What Is the Passive Voice?

In an active sentence, the subject performs the action. In a passive sentence, the subject receives it. That single shift changes both the meaning and the feel of a sentence.

Compare these two:

• Active: The chef cooked the meal. (focus on the chef)
• Passive: The meal was cooked by the chef. (focus on the meal)

The passive construction always uses the same core pattern: be + past participle. The verb “be” changes tense to tell you when the action happened; the past participle names the action itself. That is the entire engine. Master those two parts and you can build a passive sentence in any tense.

Practising passive voice sentence structure with pen and paper

被動語態的構成方式 | How to Form the Passive Voice

The formula never changes. What shifts is the form of “be” to match the tense you need.

Student notebook with passive voice grammar notes and examples

One thing worth noting: not every tense appears with equal frequency. Present simple, past simple, and present perfect passive forms dominate real-world English — especially in news reports, academic papers, and business correspondence. If you focus on those three first, you will handle 90% of the passive voice you encounter.

什麼時候用被動語態？| When Should You Use the Passive Voice?

Passive voice has a reputation for being “weak” or “unclear,” and that is sometimes true. But used in the right context, it is not weak — it is precise. There are four situations where passive is clearly the better choice.

1. When the doer is unknown: “My bike was stolen last night.” You do not know who took it. Saying “Someone stole my bike” works, but “was stolen” is more natural in English.

2. When the doer is obvious or unimportant: “He was arrested on Tuesday.” Everyone understands the police made the arrest. Adding “by the police” adds no new information and slows the sentence down.

3. In formal and scientific writing: Academic English avoids “I” and “we” in order to sound objective. “The sample was heated to 80°C” reads as neutral fact. “I heated the sample to 80°C” introduces the researcher — which shifts the focus away from the data.

4. To emphasize the result, not the person: “Twenty employees were promoted last quarter” highlights the outcome. “The company promoted twenty employees” shifts attention to the company. In HR communications and press releases, the result matters more than who decided it.

Business meeting where passive voice is commonly used in professional English

If none of these four conditions apply — if you know who did it, it is relevant, and the writing is informal — use active voice. Active is clearer, shorter, and easier to read. The passive is a tool, not a default setting.

For more on formal grammar structures that pair well with professional writing, see our guide on using can, could, and may for requests and permission — these modal verbs appear constantly alongside passive constructions in business English.

By + 主詞：要不要說明是誰做的？| When to Include the Agent

In most passive sentences, the “by + agent” phrase is dropped. Keeping it short and omitting the agent is the default move. But there are two cases where you need to name who or what performed the action.

Include the agent when the person or thing is surprising or important:

• “The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci.” — The artist is the whole point of that sentence.
• “Three mistakes were made by the automated system, not the staff.” — The “by” phrase shifts responsibility and contradicts an assumption.

Drop the agent when it is obvious, unknown, or adds nothing:

• “The suspect was released this morning.” — No need for “by the police.”
• “English is spoken in over 50 countries.” — Who speaks it? Everyone.

Office workers communicating — passive voice used in formal business English

台灣學生最常犯的被動語態錯誤 | Common Mistakes Taiwan Learners Make

Four errors come up again and again in written work from Taiwan-based learners. All of them stem from a single habit: treating the passive as a translation of the Chinese 被 (bèi) structure, which works differently.

Teacher explaining active and passive voice to students in a classroom

Mistake 1 — Missing the “be” verb:
✗ “The report written by the manager last week.”
✓ “The report was written by the manager last week.”
The past participle alone is not a passive. The verb “be” is mandatory.

Mistake 2 — Wrong preposition (from instead of by):
✗ “The homework was done from the student.”
✓ “The homework was done by the student.”
English passive always uses “by.” Chinese “被” can suggest “from,” but do not carry that over.

Mistake 3 — Wrong past participle form:
✗ “The car was drived to Taichung.”
✓ “The car was driven to Taichung.”
Irregular verbs must be memorized. Drive → driven. Write → written. Break → broken. See our second conditional guide for another structure that depends on getting past participles right.

Mistake 4 — Passive with intransitive verbs:
✗ “He was arrived at the station at 9 a.m.”
✓ “He arrived at the station at 9 a.m.”
Intransitive verbs — arrive, happen, exist, sleep — cannot take a direct object, so they cannot be made passive. Only transitive verbs (those that act on something) can flip into the passive.

Grammar study guide open on passive voice exercises and rules

主動 vs 被動：快速比較 | Active vs Passive: A Quick Comparison

Writing in English focusing on converting active sentences to passive voice

觀看影片 | Watch: Passive Voice Step-by-Step

This engVid lesson walks through passive construction across tenses with clear examples. It ranks consistently in the top results for passive voice grammar — which says something about how well it explains the concept.

被動語態練習題 | Passive Voice Practice Exercises

Convert each active sentence into the correct passive form. Answers are below — try the sentences first before checking.

1. Someone stole the manager’s laptop. → The manager’s laptop _______________.
2. The company will announce the results next week. → The results _______________.
3. Engineers are repairing the server right now. → The server _______________.
4. The government has increased taxes twice this year. → Taxes _______________.
5. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600. → Hamlet _______________.

Answers:

1. The manager’s laptop was stolen.
2. The results will be announced next week.
3. The server is being repaired right now.
4. Taxes have been increased twice this year.
5. Hamlet was written by Shakespeare around 1600.

For more grammar practice on sentence structures that often appear alongside passive voice in formal English, check out our guide on English question tags — 15 rules Taiwan learners need. And if you want to level up your overall grammar toolkit, the British Council’s passive forms reference is a thorough free resource worth bookmarking.

來源

1. British Council — Passive Forms Grammar Reference — Authoritative free grammar reference used widely in EFL teaching worldwide.
2. Cambridge ELT Blog — Passive Voice: What It Is and When to Use It — Cambridge’s overview of passive voice usage contexts with examples from corpus data.
3. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education — corpus-based frequency data for passive constructions in academic writing (approx. 25% of verb phrases).