1.3 Voice

Passive versus active voice in scientific writing has been a controversial issue for many years. Without any doubt, the tradition of using the passive voice in scientific reporting is firmly engraved in scientists’ brains. Many scientific communicators believe that it is inappropriate, even impolite, to use the personal pronouns such as “I” or “we.” They would prefer to say, “it was studied” rather than “I studied” or “we studied.” The passive sentence does not tell us who studied the subject in question. In his book published in 1971, John Swales states that,“ … passive sentences are clearer. The first reason for this is that passive sentences do not mention people. For a scientist, many references to people are unnecessary and confusing.”

Thus, the passive voice is frequently used in technical and scientific writing because the form is impersonal and objective. The action is felt to be more important than the agent or the performer of the action.

Nowadays, most modern grammarians, linguists, and editors agree that the exclusive use of the passive voice is redundant. In this time and age where brevity and conciseness of manuscripts are critical factors, the active voice helps to keep messages clear. Moreover, our time constraints with both the writing and reading of scientific information call for an unambiguous language involving active verbs and personal pronouns wherever possible. Active statements are invariably shorter and help avoid unnecessary guessing as to who is responsible for the work reported.

It is possible to write papers almost entirely in the passive voice; but it is usually distorting and tortuous to do so. You run the risk of unintentionally changing your emphasis and meaning, and of increasing the verbosity of your text.

‘Voice’ is a grammatical term used to describe the possibility we have in English of viewing the action of a sentence in two ways without changing the facts reported:

Active: The team studied the genetic mutations.

Passive: The genetic mutations were studied by the team.

Although the two sentences say more or less the same thing, the emphasis is different. The subject position in a sentence is where we normally place (and look for) the topic of that sentence. If the subject of the sentence performs the action, the sentence is in the active voice, but if the subject of the sentence is the recipient of the action, the sentence is passive. The active sentence above makes a statement about the team; the passive sentence makes a statement about the genetic mutations. By using the passive construction, the centre of interest is moved from the ‘performer/doer’ to the ‘undergoer of the action / subject studied’. Though the information remains essentially the same, the emphasis is different.

The passive voice is a valuable feature of the language, and it is widely used in all forms of writing and speaking, not just in science and technology. But it is vital to note that the active and passive voices are used for specific purposes, to create deliberate balance or emphasis in a statement. Therefore they should not be interchanged arbitrarily or haphazardly.