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• Classic-Fiction

More generally, the passive voice can provide a way to avoid using the pronoun “I,” whether for reasons of convention, as indicated earlier, or for other reasons. For example, the following passive sentence begins a business memo from a supervisor to the staff in her office.

The Inventory and Reprint departments have recently been restructured and merged.

Like many passive sentences, this one names no actor; we do not know for sure who did the restructuring and merging, though we might imagine that the author of the memo is the responsible party. The supervisor might, then, have written the sentence in the active voice.

I have recently restructured and merged the Inventory and Reprint departments.

But the active version is less satisfactory than the passive one for two reasons: one of practical emphasis and one of sensitivity to the audience (tone). First, the fact of the changes is more important for the memo’s readers than is the announcement of who made the changes. The passive sentence appropriately emphasizes the changes; the active sentence inappropriately emphasizes the person who made the changes. Second, the emphasis of the active sentence on “I” (the supervisor) risks alienating the readers by taking an autocratic tone and by seeming to exclude all others from possible credit for the presumably worthwhile reorganization.

On balance, “consider” is the operative term when you choose between passive and active as you revise the syntax of your drafts. Recognize that you do have choices—in emphasis, in relative directness, and in economy. All things being equal and disciplinary conventions permitting, the active is usually the better choice.

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Try This 18.9: Converting Passive to Active

Identify all of the sentences that use the passive voice in one of your papers. Then, rewrite these sentences, converting passive into active wherever appropriate. Finally, count the total number of words, the total number of prepositions, and the average sentence length (words per sentence) in each version. What do you discover?

For more practice, here’s another exercise. Compose a paragraph of at least half a page in which you use only the passive voice and verbs of being, followed by a paragraph in which you use only the active voice. Then, rewrite the first paragraph using only active voice, if possible, and rewrite the second paragraph using only passive voice and verbs of being as much as possible. How do the paragraphs differ in shape, length, and coherence?

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Sentence Style in Science Writing: A Biochemistry Professor Speaks

Most of the advice offered in this chapter also applies to the very specialized writing style expected in lab reports and other formal science writing. Like academic style in general, science writing is concerned with combining ideas in order to locate emphasis appropriately and to create greater concision than a string of simple sentences would allow. The voice, ethos, and tone of science writing is typically quite muted. Active verbs appear, but the style goes out of its way to not call attention to itself, and especially not to the writer. This muted quality is, in fact, true of most academic writing, but it is markedly so in the sciences.

In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, biochemistry professor Keri Colabroy shares the basic guidelines for constructing sentences in scientific style that she provides for her science majors.

Voices from Across The Curriculum

Subjects (the “actor” is absent)

• Passive voice

Yes: The gel was run; No: I ran the gel.

Better: The protein migrated at a molecular weight of … (data first, not procedure)

• Pronouns—it’s safer to avoid them

Verbs (qualify, qualify, qualify…)

• Do: demonstrate, indicate, suggest, construct, deliver, observe

• Don’t: show, prove, make

Sentences

• Don’t say in two sentences what you can say with one (embedding).

• Subordinate and coordinate.

Words

• Data are plural.

• When making observations, use academic, not conversational language.