Introduction
Here is one event, told three ways: "The company cut 300 jobs." "300 jobs were cut." "Job cuts followed." Nothing about the facts has changed, but everything about the story has. In the first version, someone did something. In the second, something simply happened to 300 jobs. In the third, the cutting has become a kind of weather: it arrived, and nobody is holding the umbrella.
If you've already worked through the C1 page on the Impersonal Passive and Nominalisation, you know how to BUILD these forms. This page is about the next skill: choosing between them on purpose, and noticing when other people have done the same. At C2, grammar stops being only about what is correct and starts being about what your choice quietly tells the reader.
The Core Choices: The Agent Ladder
Take one event: a company pollutes a river. Here is the same fact at five different levels of "who did it" visibility, from most visible to least.
| Level | Example |
|---|---|
| 1. Active, agent as subject The agent is the star. | The company dumped toxic waste into the river. |
| 2. Passive, agent named with "by" The agent is still there, but the waste is now the topic, and the company arrives at the END — where English likes to put the weightiest information. | Toxic waste was dumped into the river by the company. |
| 3. Agentless passive The agent is simply deleted. | Toxic waste was dumped into the river. |
| 4. Nominalisation The action becomes a thing. The agent disappears, the timing gets vague, and the sentence is now really about what the "thing" caused or received. | The dumping of toxic waste into the river has raised concerns. |
| 5. Agent removed without any passive The human action vanishes and the river seems to have changed all by itself. | The river became contaminated. · There was contamination of the river. |
A small reference list of nominalisation pairs (the noun forms are NOT predictable, so learn them as pairs):
Two grammar details you'll need. First, the thing that was acted on attaches to the noun with "of": the dumping OF waste, the approval OF the plan. Second, if you do want to keep the agent, a passive marks it with "by": the approval of the plan BY the board.
This famous phrase combines several small choices, each of which pushes responsibility a little further away: an agentless passive (nobody is named), the vague noun "mistakes" (which says nothing about intention), and the past tense (which puts everything at a distance). It can be pushed even further: "If mistakes were made, they will be corrected" adds a hedge, and "Mistakes have been made" adds a present-perfect haze. Political analyst William Schneider is credited with dubbing this whole effect the "past exonerative," and columnist William Safire helped make the label famous.
The opposite strategy is just as deliberate: "I made mistakes" or "We got this wrong, and here is how we're fixing it" puts the agent back in the spotlight, and modern advice on sincere apologies usually recommends exactly that.
The Real Rule: Why This Doesn't Generalize
The passive is not evasive by nature. It has perfectly honest jobs: the agent may be unknown ("My bike was stolen"), obvious ("The suspect was arrested"), unimportant ("The samples were centrifuged for ten minutes"), or simply not the topic ("The new bridge was opened in May"). A passive only becomes strategic, or evasive, when the agent is known, relevant, and something the reader would expect to be told, and is left out anyway.
Voice is also about flow, not only blame. English likes to start with familiar information and finish with new or weighty information. A passive with "by" lets you keep your topic in first position and save the agent for the end: "The museum's most valuable painting is the Rossi. It was stolen in 1998 by a night guard." Choosing that passive isn't hiding anyone; it is making the paragraph read smoothly.
Deleting the agent does not require the passive. Intransitive verbs (occur, happen, arise, take place, and "break" in "the window broke") and existential "there" ("There were errors") remove the agent while staying fully active. Because intransitive verbs have no object, they can never be made passive at all: "Errors were occurred" is simply ungrammatical. It also means that "just switch to the active voice" does not automatically restore accountability: "Errors occurred" is active and still agentless.
Nominalisation compresses far more than the passive does. It can drop the agent, the time, and often the speaker's certainty all at once, and it turns an action into an abstract thing that can be "raised," "expressed," or "followed." That's why formal, legal and bureaucratic writing loves it, and why a paragraph full of nominalisations tends to sound foggy. The noun forms are also irregular (see the pairs above), which is a common source of slips.
Active voice is a strategic choice too, not a default virtue. Using "I" or "we" with a concrete verb signals ownership and clarity, and that's the right tool for real apologies and clear instructions. But "prefer the active voice" is a tendency, not a law; points 1 and 2 show plenty of situations where the passive is the better choice.
Common Errors
Error 1 — Passivising an intransitive verb.
✓ Several errors occurred in the accounts.
Error 2 — Using the wrong noun form in a nominalisation.
✓ The refusal of the offer surprised us.
Error 3 — Marking the agent with the wrong preposition.
✓ The letter was written by the director.
Error 4 — Deleting an agent the reader clearly needs.
Error 5 — Stacking passives and nominalisations until nothing is left.
✓ The team reorganised the department.
Error 6 — Assuming voice alone decides accountability.
Register and Usage
The same choice can be neutral in one setting and slippery in another.
| Scientific & technical writing | The agentless passive is the expected convention in methods sections ("The samples were centrifuged..."); the researcher isn't the point. |
| Legal & bureaucratic writing | Heavy use of passives and nominalisations ("The applicant shall be notified of the termination of the agreement"), partly for precision, partly by tradition. |
| Journalism | Short passives keep headlines compact ("House destroyed by fire"), but headline wording can shift where attention lands, so editors think hard about it. |
| Crisis communication, politics & corporate statements | Agentless passives and nominalisations are a well-known way of softening blame — speakers and organisations of every kind and every political colour have used "mistakes were made." Readers have become sharp at spotting it. |
| Everyday speech | The active dominates. A passive in casual talk can sound stiff, and "Mistakes were made" in a personal apology to a friend sounds cold precisely because it is so institutional. |
The C2 habit worth building is a simple pair of questions when you read: would I expect an agent here, and if the writer knew it, why was it left out? Sometimes the answer is "no reason, it's just science." Sometimes it isn't.
Don't Confuse This With: the C1 Page, and "Passive" with "Agentless"
This page is the strategy layer on top of the mechanics taught on the C1 Impersonal Passive and Nominalisation page. That page teaches specific reporting structures such as "It is said that..." and "There is a report that..."; this page is about the general decision of how to frame any event. Learn the structures there, then use them purposefully here.
It also helps to keep two separate questions apart, because they are not the same axis. One is voice (active or passive). The other is whether the agent is named or hidden. All four combinations exist:
| Agent named | Agent hidden | |
|---|---|---|
| Active | The company dumped waste. | Waste built up in the river. |
| Passive | Waste was dumped by the company. | Waste was dumped. |
The top-right cell is the one most learners forget exists: "waste built up" is active — there's no passive verb at all — but the agent is still nowhere to be found, because "build up" is intransitive.
Exercises
Exercise 1 — Transformation
Rewrite each sentence exactly as instructed in brackets. Keep all the other information.
Exercise 2 — Error Correction
Each sentence contains one mistake. Find it and type the sentence correctly, changing as little as possible.
Exercise 3 — Multiple Choice
Choose the best answer.
1. Compare: (a) "The bank refused the loan application." (b) "The loan application was refused." Which statement is accurate?
2. A spokesperson says: "Concerns about the delay have been raised." What does this wording do?
3. In "The dismissal of three managers shocked the industry," what has the nominalisation done?
4. Which sentence names the person responsible?
5. Which sentence leaves out the person responsible WITHOUT using the passive voice?
6. A lab report says: "The mixture was heated to 80°C for five minutes." Why is the passive normal here?
Exercise 4 — Key Word Transformation
Complete the second sentence so that it means the same as the first, using the key word given. The key word must not be changed in any way. Use between three and eight words, including the key word.