Writing again- yes, you said something very similar to what i said-
however, i feel compelled to object to any explanation involving nouns being active or passive.
passive, as was said, is a voice. a real understanding of grammar is essential for a writer. if i seem a angry about this beyond the import of this discussion, it is because of arguments i have been having with a friend of mine.
we teach a japanese class to some other homeschooled kids. we aren't fluent or in japanese, not close really, but definitely far ahead of our students.
my friend and i both have a natural talent for languages. he is much better than i am at remembering vocabulary, writing japanese characters, and intuitively grasping how a japanese person would say something. he speaks japanese much better than i do. however, i can grasp grammar with comparative ease. Latin conjugations, declension- english moods, participles and gerunds- these things trouble my classmates more than me. unfortunately, i still need to learn vocabulary.
anyway, whenever i try to explain the language in grammatical terms my firewnd object, and repeats "that doesn't help people understand." his argument is that real japanese people don't think in terms of indirect objects, gerunds, and topic markers. they just know to use ni with certain verbs.
however, that is only the way that they can speak it, because growing up in japan gives them an instinctive understanding. in order to allow students to expand their knowledge by themselves, they must understand grammatical terms.
how does this apply to the case at hand? well, when it comes to truly grammatical formal eenglish, ther are comparatively few native speakers. even many americans grow up unfamiliar with the subjunctive, or the passive.
therefore, the only to truly grasp them, for those who haven't used them correctly since childhood, is an understanding of basic grammatical terms.
it isn't that hard. most grammatical terms apply to many languages- the same metalingual vocabulary has seen me through english, lating, greek, japanese, and spanish. A small amount of effort to understand what is meant by voice, mood, tense, case, and so on will make everything to do with language simpler.
it's like the fiasco of the "whole word reading" method. without a grasp of phonics, or grammatical terms, people are limited to rote regurgitation of the sentence patterns they understand.
phonics, that is to say a grasp of grammar, allows much deeper comprehension and more fluent composition.
so please, writing again, don't insist that using the word passive correctly is confusing. it's just somehting everyone needs to leanr sooner or later.