What you need to know
To achieve 100 you need to recognise the active and passive voices.
- Most sentences are written in the active voice (e.g. George broke the window). They follow a subject + verb + object order.
- Sometimes, a different word order is used: object + verb + subject (e.g. The window was broken by George or The window was broken). This is called the passive voice.
- The passive voice is used when: the writer wants to focus on the object (e.g. the window); the writer doesn't want to say who did the action (e.g. George); the person is unknown (e.g. A vase was mysteriously broken); it doesn't matter who did it (e.g. The ball was kicked into the net).