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Australian manual of scientific style Start communicating effectively
Taking care with passive voice
What is passive voice? Should you use it?
The subject of a sentence is the first thing (noun) we encounter as we read. When the subject of the sentence is not acting, the sentence is in the passive voice. If I say:
The bank was robbed.
The bank is the subject (the first noun, basically), but it does nothing. Something is done to it. A document with a lot of passive sentences sounds dull, monotonous and wordy. It’s boring, like a movie in which the main character just lets things happen to them and then moans about it.
If I say:
I robbed the bank.
Straight away things are more exciting! (My life certainly is.) Here the subject is I and is active. The active sentence gives as much or more information in as many or fewer words. It’s punchier, briefer and more to the point. A reader responds to that and gets your message more readily.
Activity
Please rewrite these sentences to make them active.
Passive voice avoids the need for an actor, which can be good because it makes a statement universal.
All people are created equal.
Rules are made to be broken.
It is also one way to say what happened when we don’t know who did it (or don’t want to say!). We might choose between:
Someone ate the biscuits. [active]
and
The biscuits were eaten. [passive]
These are not quite identical, because the first focuses on the unknown someone, the second focuses on the fate of the biscuits.
Tip. We can use active versus passive to control the focus.
In science, the same experiment should give the same results regardless of who does it, or where or when. If I say (actively):
I found that the crystal structure of NaCl is face-centred cubic.
I am talking about me as well as NaCl. If I say (passively):
The crystal structure of NaCl was found to be face-centred cubic.
The focus is on NaCl, not on me – which may be more appropriate.
Normal speech is about 40% passive, 60% active, so don’t be paranoid about the passive voice, but don’t overuse it.
Tip. Use passive voice by choice, not by default. The passive voice is grammatically correct and sometimes necessary, but use the active voice when it gives the correct meaning.
Microsoft Word can indicate passive phrases if you check some boxes. They might be listed under:
Options > Proofing > Grammar Settings
(How to find the menu may depend on your version of Word.)
Tip. Word’s checker will pick up some instances that are not passive and miss others that are. Check the checker!