1. Introduction
Two of the most heavily tested grammar transformations in Bangladeshi government job exams (BCS, Bank, and IT-officer posts) are Voice (Active ↔ Passive) and Narration (Direct ↔ Indirect Speech). Almost every "Transformation of Sentences" section carries 2–6 marks from these two topics combined, and MCQ papers routinely ask you to pick the correct passive form of a given active sentence, or the correct indirect form of a quoted statement.
These are not topics you can memorize sentence by sentence — there are infinitely many sentences. Instead, they run on a small set of mechanical rules that, once internalized, let you convert any sentence correctly and fast. This lesson teaches those rules from first principles: what a voice is, why the object becomes the subject, how tenses "shift back" in reported speech, and how pronouns, time words, and reporting verbs change. Master the rule engine and you can answer any question the examiner invents.
2. Learning objectives
After finishing this lesson you will be able to:
- Define Active and Passive voice and identify the voice of any sentence.
- Convert Active → Passive and Passive → Active across all 12 tenses, plus modals, imperatives, and infinitives.
- Handle special passive cases: sentences with two objects, prepositional verbs, verbs of perception, and "It is said that…" structures.
- Define Direct and Indirect speech and the four sentence types in narration (assertive, interrogative, imperative, optative/exclamatory).
- Apply the rules of change in narration: reporting verb, conjunction, pronoun (SON rule), tense back-shift, and word substitutions (this→that, now→then, etc.).
- Combine both skills (change the voice inside reported speech) and avoid the classic exam traps.