Writing
Passive voice, and when it is right
The advice to avoid it is nearly right, which is what makes it so unhelpful.
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 It was decided that funding would be withdrawn.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
The manuscript was copied in the twelfth century.
Nobody knows by whom. Guessing to satisfy a style rule would be worse than the passive.
2. The actor is irrelevant
The samples were stored at −80°C.
A methods section is describing a procedure, not a person. Which technician operated the freezer is not information anyone wants, and putting it in the subject position implies it matters.
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
Ethical approval was granted in March.
By the ethics committee. Saying so adds four words and no information.
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.
Roman coinage circulated widely in Britain. Archaeologists have recovered hoards of it from over forty sites.
Passive, and betterRoman coinage circulated widely in Britain. Hoards have been recovered from over forty sites.
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.
It has been argued that the policy failed.
HonestAhmed (2019) argues that the policy failed.
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.
A rough guide to how much
There is no correct percentage, and anyone giving you one is inventing it. As orientation:
| Section | Passive is |
|---|---|
| Methods | Conventional and expected |
| Results | Common, especially reporting procedures |
| Introduction and discussion | Less so — this is where you attribute claims |
| Literature review | Least — naming who said what is the entire job |
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.