Everyone drinks water.
Water is drunk by everyone.

“Voice” is a grammatical category that applies to verbs. Voice in English expresses the relationship of the subject to the action. Voice has two values:

• active: the subject does the action
• passive: the subject receives the action

Shakespeare	wrote	Hamlet.
		Hamlet	was written	by	Shakespeare.

The active voice is the “normal” voice – the one that we use most of the time. In the active voice, the object receives the action of the verb:

active	subject	verb	object
	→
Cats	eat	mice.

The passive voice is less common. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb:

passive	subject	verb	object
←
Mice	are eaten	by cats.

See how the object of the active verb becomes the subject of the passive verb:

	subject	verb	object
active	Everybody	drinks	water.
passive	Water	is drunk	by everybody.