grammar girl here. This week we're going to talk about a mistake a lot of people make when they're

trying to identify a sentence in the passive voice. I had lunch with an old friend last weekend and

we got to talking about passive voice because that's how we roll. And something came up about verbs

such as were and was that I think is confusing to a lot of people. I know it was confusing to her

and by the end of the conversation it was confusing to me too. Here's the deal. Many people think

any sentence that has a verb like is, was, or were in it is passive voice. But that's not true.

A passive sentence is when the object of the sentence gets promoted to the subject position.

Here's an active sentence. I mailed the letter. I is the subject, is taking the action

and is in the subject position. And the letter is the object, is being acted on, and is in the

standard object position. If you flip it around and promote the object, the letter, to the subject

position before the verb, you get a passive sentence. The letter was mailed by me. Sometimes people

miss the point that the sentence must have an object, the receiver of the action, to be able to

be phrased in the passive voice. If a sentence doesn't have an object, you can't move the words

around to make it passive. In a passive voice sentence, that object, the receiver of the action,

the letter in this case, is in the subject position in the sentence. The letter was mailed by me.

Sometimes a sentence will leave off the by me part, and you'll end up with something like this.

The letter was mailed. But notice that the receiver of the action is still in the subject position.

If you're trying to figure out whether a sentence is in the passive voice, one trick is to see if

you can add by so-and-so to the end. If you can, it's in passive voice. A passive voice sentence

must have an object. Here's an active sentence with no object. We ran. There's no way to make that

passive without adding something. Maybe if you're Yoda and say run we did, but there's no way to do

it in a normal English, and even in Yoda English, I wouldn't call it passive. Let's think back to

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