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Could you help me please to rewrite these sentences in passive?

I. The court has decided to award damages of three million pounds for copyright infringement.

II. We will really need to discuss the implication of this development at the next meeting.

I is supposed to begin with "Three million pounds...", and II with "The implication..."

The variants that I've tried to do myself are incorrect:

I. Three million pounds will be awarded as a damage to copyright infringement, as the court has decided.

II. The implication will be needed to be discussed at the next meeting.

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    Hi Alexandra, welcome to ELL! Can you please edit your question to explain why you think your attempts are incorrect, and why you're trying to do this conversion?
    – WendiKidd
    Oct 2, 2013 at 16:50

2 Answers 2

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How about:

I. Three million pounds was awarded in damages by the court for the copyright infringement.

II. The implication of this development needs to be discussed at the next meeting.

I think they sound fairly natural, while abiding by the rather artificial 'rules' of the OP.

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  • I'm not sure I understand. How are the sentences 'randomly changed' in my versions?
    – fred2
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:30
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    Well, sentence I originally had two clauses (headed by decided and award). Instead of casting them both in the passive, you got rid of the verb from the matrix clause entirely and rewrote the remaining elements as a single clause! That's rather important, since it changes the meaning of the sentence. On a less important note, you rewrote the subject damages of three million pounds as three million pounds, then added in the missing bits as a preposition phrase in damages, and added an article to copyright infringement. So I count four main differences.
    – user230
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:36
  • The second sentence is pretty good. The main clause is still in the active voice, but I'm not sure what you're supposed to do about that. And you got rid of really, but all I can say to that is good riddance! ;-)
    – user230
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:40
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    +1, though. This is probably as good as it gets, given the OP's ill-formed requirements. (And that's not an insult--you certainly did better than I did!)
    – user230
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:50
  • It depends what the OP needs I suppose. I see that 'decided to award' and 'was awarded' are strictly different, but the former is an inherent characteristic of the latter. One cannot be awarded something without a decision to award being made. If I were a grammar teacher, I'd prefer to see someone learn how to write clean, simple sentences in the passive, even if that means a bit more of a hatchet job on the source sentence, than tie themselves in knots. But I may be in a minority there.
    – fred2
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:50
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For statement 1 which is:

The court has decided to award damages of three million pounds for copyright infringement.

The passive voice will be:

Three million pounds for copyright infringement has been decided to be awarded by the court as damages.

For example 2 which is:

We will really need to discuss the implication of this development at the next meeting.

The passive voice would be:

The implication of this development will really be needed to be discussed at the next meeting by us.

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  • @snailboat, Thanks for the edit improving the snetences. I was also thinking about the oddness of the sentences :-)
    – Mistu4u
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:11
  • @snailboat, Is it possible to rewrite the passive voices retaining the OP's constraints reducing the oddness?
    – Mistu4u
    Oct 2, 2013 at 18:14

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