Glossary

The passive voice: a legitimate tool that costs you the actor

The passive voice puts the thing acted on in the subject position — “the samples were incubated” — and lets you omit the actor entirely. It earns its place in a methods section, where the procedure matters more than who performed it, and costs you clarity anywhere the agent is actually the point.

Why it matters when you are writing

The blanket advice to avoid it is bad advice. Choose the passive when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or obvious; when the object is the topic your paragraph is tracking; or when the convention of your field expects it, as in the methods sections of most experimental journals. Style guides that ban it outright produce awkward sentences full of invented actors.

The real cost is agent deletion. “Errors were made in the coding” names nobody, and in a limitations section that vagueness is doing work you probably do not want. Where accountability matters — who decided, who coded, who chose the threshold — the active voice answers a question the passive leaves open, and reviewers notice which one you picked.

Field norms are shifting and it is worth checking rather than assuming. APA explicitly encourages first-person active constructions for your own actions: “we recruited 240 participants” is now standard in psychology. Many biomedical journals still prefer the passive throughout the methods. Read three recent papers in your target journal and follow what they do.

IN PRACTICE

Where each voice belongs

Before

It was decided by the research team that the threshold would be lowered to 0.05.

After

We lowered the threshold to 0.05. (In the methods, the passive remains natural: samples were incubated at 37 °C for 24 hours.)

OFTEN CONFUSED WITH

What Passive voice is not

Past tense: Tense marks when something happened; voice marks whether the subject acts or is acted on. “We incubated” is active and past.
Impersonal style: Avoiding “I” and “we” is a separate convention — you can write impersonally in the active voice using “this study examines.”
Nominalization: Nominalization turns the verb into a noun; the passive keeps the verb and reorders the clause around it.

Questions about passive voice

Should I avoid the passive voice completely?

No. Use it when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or when the object is your topic. Avoid it when hiding the actor obscures who was responsible for a decision.

Is the passive required in methods sections?

It is conventional in much of the biomedical literature and no longer expected in psychology, which encourages active first-person. Check your target journal.

Can I use “we” in a single-authored paper?

Many fields accept “I,” and some still prefer impersonal constructions. APA permits “I”; check your journal, and never use “we” to mean yourself and the reader in a results section.

Related terms

Nominalization

Nominalization turns a verb or adjective into a noun — analyze becomes analysis, apply becomes application — and then needs a weak verb to carry the sentence.

Academic register

Scholarly writing is expected to hold a particular tone — precise, reserved about the writer’s feelings, cautious about claims, free of contractions, slang, and rhetorical questions.

IMRaD

IMRaD names the four-part structure of most empirical papers: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

Readability

Readability describes how much effort a reader spends decoding your sentences rather than thinking about your argument.

Write it once.
Prove you wrote it.

Copyeditor is an academic writing workspace — structured drafting, citations that build their own bibliography, and a signed record of how your document came together.

Apply for beta

*Beta opens this season — starting with students and researchers.