How to...passive

Question

How to change senteces such as: "Open the door" into a passive form??

Yankee · Accepted Answer

Anonymous"Open the door"

That is an imperative sentence. We don't usually change imperative sentences to the passive form. In your imperative sentence, it is clear that the speaker is telling "you" to open the door -- even though the word "you" is not used in the sentence. Trying to use a passive form would remove the clear idea of "you" -- which is the whole point of using an imperative sentence in the first place.

You could say something such as this:

- The door must be opened.
OR
- The door is to be opened immediately.

However, the idea that "you" (rather than someone else) are the one who should open the door is lost in those passive sentences. So, neither one is really a good transformation of the original imperative sentence.

Anonymous · Answer

What about :

Let the door be opened.

Our teacher taught us that.

Yankee · Answer

Hi Anon

That sentence is OK grammatically, but it certainly does not carry the same meaning as the imperative sentence "Open the door."

If you say "Open the door" to someone, you are basically commanding that person to open the door. It is something like saying "You must open the door."

If you say "Let the door be opened", that suggests that you are telling a person to allow someone else to open the door. In other words, you are not saying that the door must be opened, and you are not telling the person you are talking to to open the door.

In addition, the sentence "Open the door" is a very typical sort of sentence. But the sentence "Let the door be opened" would sound extremely stilted and unnatural if you simply wanted someone to open the door.

How to...passive

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