Reporting a claim without owning it
How formal written English lets you pass on what people are claiming while quietly making clear that you are not the one claiming it.
It is widely assumed that the merger will proceed.
These structures let you transmit a claim to your reader while declining to endorse it. The passive removes the source, so nobody is named as the person making the claim and you take on no responsibility for whether it is true. Two shapes carry this: a dummy subject followed by a passive reporting verb and a full clause; and a raised subject, meaning the person or thing the claim is about, or the existential opener standing in the same slot, followed by a passive reporting verb and an infinitive. Use the simple infinitive when the reported situation overlaps with the reporting or is still to come, and the perfect infinitive when it was already over before the reporting.
The subject at the front of the second pattern belongs to the reported event, not to the act of reporting: that person or company is not saying anything, other people are saying it about them. Learners routinely build the sentence as though the named subject were the one reporting, which reverses the meaning entirely. Second, choose the infinitive by time rather than by the tense of the reporting verb: the simple form for a situation that still holds or has yet to happen, the perfect form for one that was already finished. Third, remember what the register costs you. These structures are cold and institutional, and in a spoken meeting they read as evasion rather than as care, so a named source is usually stronger when you have one.