A MEMBER of Jose Carrillo’s Forum who goes by the user name Baklis asked me this tough question recently: “How does the perfect tense in the passive voice differ from the perfect tense in the active voice?”

Absolutely no one has ever asked me that question in the more than 13 years that I have been writing on English usage, and it’s probably because hardly anybody uses the perfect tenses in the passive voice owing to its rather complicated grammar mechanism. So before I can answer that question meaningfully, I’ll first have to define those two grammar terms, show how they are formed, and give examples of their usage.

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