Academic Guides: Scholarly Voice: Active vs. Passive Voice (2024)

FAQs

Academic Guides: Scholarly Voice: Active vs. Passive Voice? ›

Using active voice often improves clarity, while passive voice can help avoid unnecessary repetition. Active voice can help ensure clarity by making it clear to the reader who is taking action in the sentence.

In scientific writing, we use both voices to write clear and coherent research articles. Although many scientists overuse the passive voice, most scientific journals (e.g. Science and Nature) actually encourage active voice.

APA recommends the active voice for clarity. However, the passive voice may be used, with intention, to remove the emphasis on the subject and also as a method for varying sentence structure.

Why is avoiding passive voice important? The passive voice is most often avoided in an academic setting. One reason is for the sake of clarity: in a sentence written in passive voice, it is often unclear who or what is doing the action of the sentence. Writing in the active voice makes a sentence more direct.

Use the active voice as much as possible to create direct, clear, and concise sentences, especially when you are writing about the actions of people. Use the passive voice when it is more important to focus on the recipient of an action than on who performed the action, such as when describing an experimental setup.

In fact, multidisciplinary SCI-indexed journals like Nature and specialist journals like the American Journal of Botany, in their instructions for authors, state that the active voice is preferred. This is why you would now find the usage “In this study, we investigated…” very common.

It will depend on what you, the writer, want to convey: if you want to draw attention to the doer, use the passive voice; if your intent is to put the focus on the action, then you should go for the active voice.

The answer to this question is, yes, but with the caveat; it depends upon when and how you use them. The passive voice is better for certain purposes and the active voice is better for others. Most college papers will require you to use the active voice.

Passive voice is not always inappropriate in academic writing but it can sometimes be necessary or useful depending on the purpose and audience. It can emphasize the object or result of the action rather than the agent, help to avoid redundancy, and maintain objectivity when the agent is irrelevant or unknown.

Passive voice isn't wrong exactly, and there are some times when it is useful. But a good writing teacher will instruct students to avoid passive voice in most cases. Academic writing is usually terrible, and not a good example of quality writing. Avoid passive voice in impactful writing for a general audience.

Should academic essays be in active or passive voice? ›

Generally, in scholarly writing, with its emphasis on precision and clarity, the active voice is preferred.

Use of the passive voice is not a grammatical error. It's a stylistic issue that pertains to clarity—that is, there are times when using the passive voice can prevent a reader from understanding what you mean.

Passive voice removes agency and responsibility from the individual carrying out the action.

In academic contexts, active voice is often preferred over passive voice because it achieves clear, concise, and interesting writing.

Benefits of Active Voice

Active voice sentences are clear. There's no mistaking who is performing the action, and what the action is. Clarity is one of the characteristics of effective professional writing, and active voice contributes to that clarity.

Although active voice is incredibly useful, the passive voice is occasionally the better choice. For instance, you may go passive if the actor of a sentence is unknown or irrelevant, like in the sentence, "The amendments will be approved after a discussion".

As noted in the Academic Language section above, the tone should be formal, direct, consistent (polished and error-free), and objective. It should also be factual and not contain personal opinions.

If you do decide to use the first-person voice at times, remember that 'I' should never be considered interchangeable with 'we': a thesis has only one author and 'we' is never appropriate when referring to yourself.

The active voice is generally shorter and more direct than the passive voice, which is why it is preferable.