Academic style guide

26 Using the passive voice

General

Whether to use the passive voice or the active voice is a topic of most guidebooks on scientific writing. Overall we can say that the active voice is more concise, more direct and easier to read. However, in your academic studies you will often come across and are required to use the passive voice. For example:

The results are summarized in the table below (passive: use of ‘be’ + past participle)
not: we summarized the results in the table below.

The passive voice is used because technical reports or scientific manuscripts are impersonal. The content is separate from the personality of the writer. Even though this often leads to wordy formulations such as It is known… rather than We know…(three words instead of two), you will see the impersonal passive voice in many publications.

However, it is not merely a question of changing an active into a passive sentence: in the methodology section for example the passive voice serves to emphasise the process rather than the agent such as in Twelve experts were interviewed to… The emphasis here lies on the experts and not on the person who conducted the interview.

Language focus

Formulations such as ‘this paper presents …’, ‘this study aims at …’ use active voice but are perfect examples of impersonal language.
Be careful when using ‘It is assumed that …’ or ‘It is believed that …‘: it may not be clear if this is a statement about widely made assumptions or a held belief or your personal evaluation. You can avoid this by writing: ‘The team assumed…, or ‘The author was of the opinion’.

 

Licence

Academic Writing in a Swiss University Context Copyright © 2018 by Irene Dietrichs. All Rights Reserved.