But it is useful for those instances when you want to emphasize the fact of an action having taken place rather than who performed the action. Passive voice often gets criticized as a weak and evasive form of expression. The passive voice is often distinguished by its use of a linking verb form (e.g., was, had been) followed by another verb in its past participle form (e.g., "I have been given an opportunity"). Passive voice: The lamp was knocked over by Jerry.īoth sentences describe the same action taking place-Jerry making contact with a lamp and causing it to fall over-with the first sentence making Jerry the subject and the second making the lamp the subject. The passive voice makes the subject the person or thing acted on or affected by the action represented by the verb.Īctive voice: Jerry knocked over the lamp. The active voice asserts that the person or thing represented by the grammatical subject performs the action represented by the verb. If we, as scientists, claim to push the boundaries of science, let’s be effective about it.In English class, we are taught the difference between active and passive voice. Use passive voice when the important part is the object, when you want your reader to keep looking at something while you connect your sentences together.Do not use passive voice to hide who did what to hide the “I”, the “we” or the authors of another publication.Instead of passively applying simplistic rules of thumb like “Do” or “Don’t use passive voice”, let’s formulate the theory differently: We can then continue the paragraph with more information on demand-side management and link it to the control unit if this is relevant. Here again, in the first sentence, the passive voice enables us to stay focused on the main subject–the peak power. The control unit applied innovative demand-side management. It was shaved by innovative demand-side management. Let’s take another example, this time from a scientific article: It all depends on the object of your text, on who should be in the spotlight. Blindly banning passive is not the solution He drives too fast on this mountainous road. The driver sees the lady feeling not well. With the passive voice you stayed there, whereas in the all active sentence you switched from one protagonist to another. In our example above, you first looked at the lady. Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style tells us that the writer is like a cameraman directing the gaze of the reader towards what she should look at. With the second, the attention shifts from the lady to the driver. With the first, the reader’s attention is kept on the lady. The driver is going too fast on this mountainous road.īoth sentences work although they are fundamentally different: the first has a passive part and the second is all active. She is being driven too fast on this mountainous road. Should we always write then in active voice?Īfter all, the active voice lets us better visualise actions, right? Let’s take a second example: Academic writers do sometimes forget that they are the ones staging an event for the reader, and they need to make that clear in order to be effective. He knows how the story developed, so he just explains the outcome. Who instigated the actions? Who moved forward the experiment? The authors, the technicians, a student, another lab…? The answers are obvious to the writer. A completely homogeneous mixture was assumed.įor the reader, there is no agent in sight here and it is (oh so) difficult to picture a consequence without a cause. A small portion of gases was included in the initial composition. A nominal composition was chosen for the computations. The simulations were performed at sea level to be relevant to the calibration. Passive voice can be a very powerful writing tool, but using it for the wrong reasons may lead to confused, suspicious readers. This paradigm shift left many of us in the doubt… is using passive voice in formal, scientific writing right or wrong? More recently, the contrary philosophy bursted in: suddenly, passive voice had to be by all means avoided as it forces hiding the agent of the sentence and creates confusion. For years, we were told that in scientific writing we needed to use passive voice to sound formal, neutral and serious.
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