hey guys today i have a very quick and hopefully very helpful english speaking tip to share with
you it's about the passive voice have you heard of using the passive voice does it
sound kind of unnecessary and scary well it's actually super practical when you want to avoid
blaming someone or pointing the finger of blame why did you do that you have other options if
you want to be smoother socially if you want to be diplomatic politically and if you want to be
smart in business situations where it's not prudent or helpful to blame someone
then the passive voice is your friend and you want to know how to use it the passive voice is
often used when we don't know who did something we don't know who the subject is so we might say
someone did something but we can also use the passive voice and no subject
for example the crime was committed we could use the pronoun someone if we don't know but then we
have to say someone committed the crime we could also just say the crime was committed this is
passive voice and you'll often hear this in news reporting so you can use the passive voice to
express if you don't know who did something but it's also super helpful if you don't want to blame
someone for something for example let's say that all of my friends went out to lunch without me
and i was sad about it so i wanted to talk about it with my friend and i say hey uh
you didn't invite me to lunch this is active this is blaming this is kind of accusing my friend of
being rude and not inviting me or i could express this in a more polite softer way and say i wasn't
invited to lunch or a question why wasn't i invited to lunch versus why didn't you invite
me to lunch so you notice with the passive voice we're not using a specific subject there's no you
there is no name like jenny why didn't you invite me to lunch uh there is no subject so we avoid
really putting an emphasis on the subject we don't put any emphasis on it we completely delete the
subject and we just say i wasn't invited to lunch versus you didn't invite me to lunch we start with
the object i or me turns into i i wasn't invited to lunch so we use the object first and then
helping verb to be and then the past participle uh so invited i was not so it's negative invited why
so this is a good example of how you might use this socially in order to avoid blaming someone we
can use it in a lot of different ways like let's say you can't find your keys and you're talking to
your partner and you don't want to blame your partner for losing the keys or leaving the keys
somewhere so you don't want to say where did you leave the keys you're always losing the keys
maybe you can say where were the keys left or maybe you can ask this as a question
where were the keys left or the keys were lost i wonder where they could be versus
you lost the keys this is very accusatory and can sound rude of course if you want to start a fight
don't use the passive voice you would be much better off using the active voice to start a fight
but if you don't want to start a fight if you don't want to blame someone directly then use
the passive voice another example john ate all the ice cream i can't believe it i wanted to eat some
ice cream versus passive voice the ice cream was eaten completely eaten it's gone so we don't know
who ate the ice cream maybe we can guess but we're avoiding blaming jon for it so i hope you can see
how we can use the passive voice to avoid blaming someone when we speak english now it's your turn
i would love to invite you to create your own example sentences in the comments we can inspire
each other with more examples and help each other by correcting and making sure that they're clear
and correct examples in the comments so please leave yours i would love to see what kind of
examples you come up with and as always if you would like to improve your english speaking with
go natural english with me at gonaturalenglish.com then you can get information about the complete go
natural english course at gonaturalenglish.com pre-reg and there you'll enter your name and
your email address to get information to join the course when it opens just a few times a year so
it's important that you join the pre-registration email group to get an invitation when the course
opens up just a few times a year so i'll see you there at gonaturalenglish.com pre-reg and you can
explore the gonaturalenglish.com website where you can find hundreds of free english speaking
tips just like this one so thanks so much for watching and i'll talk to you later bye for now