Why should I avoid the Passive Voice in Spanish and how can I do this?

In English, we often use the passive voice (formed by using the verb “to be” followed by a past participle – e.g. “the cars are being sold by my dad” or “Spanish is spoken here.” Whilst it is not necessarily wrong to literally translate this as “Los coches son vendidos por mi padre” “El español es hablado aquí,” the passive should really be avoided in Spanish translations where possible. The exam boards expect you to know that in Spanish it is very common to avoid the use of the passive voice and may try to test you on this! So, how can it be avoided? There are quite a few ways that this can be done, but here are two of the most common. Firstly, in Spanish if they know who did something, they tend to say it! So the first example above would just become “mi padre vende/está vendiendo los coches.” Secondly, the reflexive pronoun “se” can also be used to avoid the passive so the second example would become “Aquí se habla español.”