Passive voice, and when it is right

Active: The researchers analysed the samples. Passive: The samples were analysed by the researchers. Passive, agent omitted: The samples were analysed.

That third form is where the interesting questions live, because it is the one that lets a sentence describe something happening without saying who did it.

How to spot it

A form of to be — is, was, were, has been, will be — followed by a past participle. If you can add “by zombies” after the verb and the sentence still parses, it is passive.

• The samples were analysed by zombies. ✓ passive
• The researchers analysed the samples by zombies. ✗ active

Silly, and it works every time.

Why “avoid the passive” is bad advice

Because it is a rule about grammar standing in for a rule about clarity, and the two come apart often enough to matter.

The real problem the advice is aiming at is hidden agency — sentences that describe actions without naming who took them. Mistakes were made. It was decided that funding would be withdrawn. Those are evasive, and the passive is how they are built.

But the passive itself is a neutral tool, and in academic writing there are four cases where it is the better choice.

The four cases where it is right

1. The actor is unknown

2. The actor is irrelevant

This is why methods sections are conventionally passive across most of the sciences. It is not evasion — it is keeping the reader’s attention on the procedure, which is the thing they need to be able to repeat.

3. The actor is obvious

4. The object is the topic

This is the most useful one and the least taught.

English sentences carry given information first and new information last. If the thing being acted on is what your paragraph is about, putting it in the subject position keeps the paragraph coherent.

The second version keeps coinage as the thread. The first introduces archaeologists as a new subject who are not what the paragraph is about, and the reader has to reorient.

The case where it is genuinely wrong

When the actor is known, relevant, and omitted anyway.

This is the version that costs marks, and not for style reasons. It has been argued hides whether one person argued it or forty, whether they are credible, and whether you agree. It is the grammatical cousin of it could be argued that — a claim made while declining to own it or attribute it.

In a discipline where knowing who claims something is half the point, that is a substantive failure rather than a stylistic one.

Turning one around, mechanically

When you have decided a passive should be active, the conversion is three steps rather than a rewrite from scratch:

1. Find the agent. It is either after by, or it is missing and you have to supply it.
2. Move it to the front. It becomes the subject.
3. Drop the to be and un-participle the verb. were analysed becomes analysed.

The step that stalls people is the first one, and it is diagnostic. If you genuinely cannot name the agent, that is worth pausing on. Sometimes it is fine — the actor really is unknown, which is case one above. But sometimes it means you have written a claim you cannot source, and the passive was hiding the gap from you as well as from your reader. Studies have shown is the classic: converting it forces the question of which studies, and occasionally the honest answer is that you read it somewhere and never checked.

Can you just write “we”?

The reason many students end up with wall-to-wall passive is that they have been told never to write I or we, and the passive is the only escape route they know.

That instruction is more dated than it sounds. The APA Publication Manual explicitly prefers the first person for describing what you did, on the grounds that the experiment was designed is ambiguous about whether you designed it or are describing someone else’s design. Most science journals now accept we, and in the humanities I is routine when you are stating a position.

What remains genuinely discouraged is the editorial “we” for a single author — we shall see in the next chapter — and I think used where an argument belongs.

The problem there was never the pronoun. It was that I think was doing the work the because clause should have been doing. Check your own department’s guidance before switching — but if the only reason you are writing passively is to dodge a pronoun, the sentence is being distorted for a rule that may not exist.

The related problem that costs more marks

Passive voice gets the blame for a density that is usually caused by something else: nominalisation, turning verbs into nouns.

Investigation, causes, decline are all actions wearing noun costumes, and once the real verbs have been nominalised the sentence needs a filler verb — undertaken, conducted, performed — to hold it together. That filler verb is very often passive, which is why the two problems travel together and why removing the passive alone rarely fixes the sentence.

The tell is a cluster of words ending in -tion, -ment, -ance or -ity. When you find one, ask what the verb underneath it is, and whether the sentence reads better with that verb doing the work.

A rough guide to how much

There is no correct percentage, and anyone giving you one is inventing it. As orientation:

If a whole essay is passive, the likely problem is not the grammar. It is that the writing has become detached from anyone doing or claiming anything, and that reads as vague however it is constructed.

Checking your own

Our readability checker flags passive constructions with their positions, which turns this from a re-read into a list. The point is not to remove them — it is to look at each one and ask the question above: is the actor unknown, irrelevant, obvious, or off-topic? If none of those, name them.

The formalizer catches the adjacent problem: hedging phrases like it could be argued that, which weaken a claim in the same way and for the same reason.