Active and Passive Voice
One key decision writers routinely make is how to construct their voice–how do you, the writer, want your writing to sound?
Active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice in which the sentence clearly indicates who’s performing the main action:
- “I kicked the ball.”
- “She wrote the paper."
- “Jane invited me to the dance.”
- “Rick spoke to Grandma on the phone for an entire hour.”
In each of these examples the agent (or subject) comes before the verb, so we know who’s kicking whom. Think of this as a form of emphasis–the writer wants readers to know what happened (a ball was kicked), but the writer also wants to clearly tell readers who is responsible . . . I did it . . . I kicked the ball, okay?
Passive voice
In passive voice, the emphasis of the sentence becomes the object–the thing that is affected by the verb.
- “The ball was kicked.”
- “The paper was finished.”
- “I was invited to the dance by Jane.”
- “Grandma was called on the phone by Rick, and an hour passed before they finished.”
- “The research and development (R&D) described in this document was conducted within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Solar Thermal Technology Program” (Alley 126).
Here, our first two examples don’t even mention who is doing the action . . . did you kick the ball? Did I finish the paper? More than likely the writer wasn’t interested in who did the action; what matters is the action itself, so the sentence focuses all its emphasis on the verb construction (was kicked) and the object (the ball).
In the last three examples the subject is delayed to the end or the middle of the sentence, again, perhaps, for emphasis—the fact that “I was invited to the dance,” I’m telling my readers, is the first thing I want you to know (sorry, Jane!).
Rhetorical Act
Here's a key takeaway: writing in the active voice or the passive voice is, at least in part, a rhetorical decision. The CEO who says “mistakes were made” in a press conference knows exactly what he or she is doing (compare this to “I made a mistake”), as does the scientist who writes “the rats were dissected” (instead of “I dissected the rats . . .”).
You’ll often hear that active is “better” if you want to write concisely or “crisply,” or that passive is the only way to write “formal papers” for scholarly audiences because it “sounds more academic.” While there are arguments to be made for claims like this, choosing to write in the active or passive voice is ultimately the writer’s decision, and that decision should be made by deciding what to emphasize (or deemphasize, as the case may be).
Final thoughts
Your choice of active or passive voice–or a combination of the two–does a lot for the readability of your writing. Don’t write passively just to up the word count. Don’t write actively if your readers shouldn’t know who’s kicking the ball.
“The burning of books is considered to be censorship by some people” may be trying too hard. This passive sentence may be forcing a distant, emotionless prose style for the sake of sounding objective, but in some ways it loses its power by sandwiching the real action of the sentence, the verb “consider,” between two forms of the “to be” verb (“is” and “to be”). Compare this with a more active approach: “Some people consider book burning censorship.”
On the flip side, the active sentence, “I tested the rats by injecting them with a serum, and then I tracked their movements through the maze I crafted out of pencils and lollipop sticks, and then I coded the results in my own little spreadsheet . . .” has a whole lot of emphases that probably don’t matter and are likely off-putting to science readers who, again, really only care about the experiment and its results rather than who performed it. Why not write, “The test rats were first injected with the test serum, after which their movements were tracked, recorded, and coded . . .”
In short, active and passive voice are grammatical and rhetorical tools, like everything else in writing, so use them accordingly.
Are you ready to talk to one of our consultants about the differences between active and passive voice? If so, consider these questions as you prepare for a consultation:
- Does my genre, assignment, or audience have an expectation for whether I use active or passive voice in this paper?
- Is my usage of active or passive voice consistent?
- Does my use of active or passive voice add to the readability of my writing?
- Where could my writing be more concise?
- Where could my writing be clearer?
- How do you, the reader, feel about the emphasis of each sentence?