This is also the difference between active and passive voice. Passive voice tends to take a more roundabout way to say the same thing. Active would be something like “the man smashed his cup when his temper flared.” It’s very direct and to the point. “Man>Smash>Cup.” The man is directly acting upon the cup. In contrast, the passive form would be more along the lines of “the cup was smashed during the man’s outburst.” It removes a lot of the action. It’s more like “Cup>was smashed” and everything after that is just additional context; We could even remove the context that the man was the one who smashed it, because it isn’t needed for the sentence to still be complete.

You see it a lot when cops fuck someone up, then have to release a public statement about it. They never say something active and straightforward like “our officers beat the handcuffed man to death.” That puts the blame squarely on the cops who killed the dude. Instead, they always say something more passive, like “the man succumbed to injuries he sustained while resisting arrest.” Notice that the former has “officers” doing the action of beating, while the latter removes officers entirely and has “man” doing all of the action. It is used to shift blame away from officers and onto victims. The former is a direct “the man died because of our officers’ actions” statement. But the latter is more like “the man failed to stay alive, and the failure is entirely on him.”