28 Active and Passive Voice

“If you’re looking for a conclusion, it’s that writing this is a choice but also not a choice. I tell myself myths about the vast gulf between choice and not-choice, but that space itself is an illusion. Let me believe that as I am, I am enough is good enough.”  – Vyshali Manivannan

Writing in an academic space, for an academic audience, in an academic genre, with an academic voice, can feel limiting at times. Scholars identify the traditional ways of making and sharing knowledge (or the epistemologies of academia) as cis-gendered, male, able-bodied, and neurotypical. What does that mean, though? How can writing be male or able-bodied?

Distancing the Readers

According to pain scholar David Morris, an article about suffering will make no connection to the topic in how it is written. Instead, it will be long (painful to read in one sitting), include no obscenities or profanities (despite the relevance to the topic), will use specialized diction and avoid familiar ideas (keeping the reader at a distance in fully understanding the text) (qtd in Manivannan). Essentially, when a topic wants to, and needs to, be shared with others (i.e., those suffering from chronic pain ), due to the limitations of academic writing, the text is needlessly made difficult to understand, especially for those who may need the information the most. I think we all have experienced a difficult academic text that was too long, too confusing, too dense, and too monotone. For Morris and Manivannan, these limitations have serious consequences as it means that the important research is not reaching the people it seeks to help. This happens most often, according to Manivannan, when the readers don’t fit into the white, male norm, or default human,  of academia.

Other Issues with Passive Voice

Along with language diversity and depth in voice that we get from code meshing, academic writing can also reproduce the “illusion of homogeneous (able-bodyminded†) academic writers with Western/rationalist notions of legitimate expertise” (Manivannan). Processes are stripped away, and instead, readers are left with the results, arguments, and expertise. Take, for example, the important decisions in research writing that either center the embodied research and writer or strip them away. Namely, the choice to write about research in passive or active voice is one that either erases the researcher or centers the researcher.

In science writing, the rhetorical decision to write in the passive voice has been questioned, as it minimizes the potential biases and methods of the researcher.

In business writing, the passive voice has allowed companies to minimize their involvement in controversial decisions.  For example, “a culturally insensitive commercial was made” is a passive way of writing about a business that created a racist advertisement. What company did it? We don’t know, and that’s the power of the passive voice, common in academic writing.

Writers Complicate these Structures

We have seen scholars push against these structures because they find them limiting. For example, Vershawn Ashanti Young advocates for code meshing in his work—inviting scholars, students, and writers to code mesh freely and openly, instead of claiming that standard American edited English is the norm. Code meshing allows academic writers to integrate writing that does not assume one voice, one perspective.

Passive and Active Voice: What is best for your writing?

If a researcher decides to write in the active voice, they center themselves as the researcher—the body that conducted the research.

Here’s an example of active voice used by a science writer:

Note these scientists are Saint Mary’s College students and a professor, all female, all centering the researcher.

More often, scientists use the passive voice to disembody the researcher, writer. Here’s an example of the passive voice:

Here, the scientists are removed from the sentence—somebody collected food in order to test BPA levels, but we do not know who.

How it works grammatically

Active Voice

We say that a sentence is in the active voice when the grammatical subject of the verb is the person or agent responsible for the action expressed by the verb

Example 1:  I surveyed all kinesiology students.

Example 2: I will survey all kinesiology students.

Passive Voice

We say that a sentence is in the passive voice when the grammatical subject of the verb is functionally the object or result of the action expressed by the verb. The agent or source of the action may be added in a prepositional phrase, but it can be (and often is) omitted.

Example 1: The participants were [to be] surveyed [past participle].

Example 2: The participants will be [to be] surveyed [past participle].

Example 3: The participants will be [to be] surveyed [past participle] by me [source of action as object].

In the following activity, we invite you to try to distinguish between active and passive sentences.

In the following activity, we invite you identify the active and passive voice in Cohen et al.’s writing.

In the following activity, we invite you reflect on Cohen et al.’s writing and how their choices affect your experience with their text.

Final Thoughts

The passive and active voice debate is one that highlights the limitations of academic writing—especially as Manivannan shows in their exploration of the disembodied voice, layout, and style of the traditional academic research article. However, we also see that we have the choice to push against the norms, like Young with code meshing and Cohen et al. with active voice.

As writers with your rhetorical choices to make, you should consider how to bring choices of voice into your writing.