please tell me the difference between the fallowing two sentences.
1: The letter is received.
2: The letter has been received.
Using ‘is’ - the emphasis is on the fact that you now have the letter,
Using ‘has been’ - the emphasis is on the fact that you had the letter earlier.
has been received mean having letter earlier but don’t have it now… itss kind of confusing for me?? can u please elaborate this… is this a kind of passive voice??
Using ‘has been’ indicates you have received it but it is not clear what has happened to the letter now. You may still have the letter. You may have done something with it or passed it on.
Your letter has been received and has been passed on to the appropriate officer. (You no longer have the letter)
Your letter has been received and we will be in touch shortly. (You still have the letter and are going to take some sort of action)
Hi Farooq_Torus,
Both ‘is received’ and ‘has been received’ are passive constructions. ‘Is received’ on its own isn’t very clear because it doesn’t tell you whether this is simply stating a fact or whether it is something that happens regularly. Let’s take another verb such as ‘deliver’, which means in this sentence take a letter to someone’s house: The postman delivers letters to our house at 7 am every morning. We can turn this into the passive: The letters are delivered by the postman every morning. This describes a repeated action. We can also say: The letters have been delivered by the postman this morning. This means he delivered the letters this morning but we don’t know exactly at what time.
Alan