What is the passive voice and how is it formed?

In a passive sentence, the thing receiving the action is the subject of the sentence and thing doing the action can be included at the end of the sentence. To form the passive, we use the verb 'être' followed by the past participle.

A few things to remember:

- The past participle must agree in both number and gender with the subject

- The passive can only be formed from transitive verbs ie. those that take a    direct object

There are various ways to avoid the passive voice:

1) Use the impersonal subject pronoun 'on'

2) Use 'se' to make the verb reflexive