Active Voice: Own Your Work

There are a lot of pitfalls that can pop-up between the intention of a writer and the impact on the reader. The choice of active or passive voice can be one of the biggest pitfalls in that space. Especially when we’re talking about science writing, and MOST especially when we’re talking about the world of peer-reviewed publication, the use of active voice over passive voice can be very contentious.

First, for those of us who haven’t spent far too much time in the hallways between conference sessions debating this, what is the difference between passive and active voice? Put simply, active voice is writing in which the subject DOES the action. “The scientist measured the change in concentration.” In passive voice, the subject has the action DONE TO IT. “The change in concentration was measured by the scientist.” Traditionally, passive voice is used to deemphasize the subject, and it’s popular in science writing for that exact reason. It is the science that matters most, not the scientist. So we remove ourselves from our work. And in that explanation, it seems an honorable, almost poetic choice. That doesn’t make it the right choice.

There are practical reasons that active voice is better for science writing. It generally results in shorter, more concise, and easier to follow sentences. Passive voice sentences are inherently longer. While it is possible to shorten passive voice sentences by removing any mention of the actor - “The change in concentration was measured.” - active voice can maintain greater grammatic integrity with shorter word counts.

But more than the slippery slope of shortened passive voice sentences that result in pages of unmoored reporting of measurements taken by no one, observations made by no one, and conclusions held by no one, are much greater consequences of that kind of writing. It is inherently harder for a reader to connect to a story that has no protagonist. And for better or worse, all writing is story. Even peer-reviewed scientific literature of the highest integrity is a story about a question worth pursuing. It’s a hero’s journey, from observation to testable hypothesis, to results, that ultimately leads us to more questions. A scientific paper holds the entire human experience in it - the drive to understand what we saw, and the realization that there will always be more to know. It should be easy to be gripped and inspired by such journeys. But when there’s no on IN that story, how can you? Putting it that way may seem silly and fanciful, but a 2019 study [1] demonstrated that readers found active voice paragraphs easier to understand and more interesting. Study participants were also more likely to experience increased psychological distance, and therefore a weaker emotional connection, to writing that was in passive voice. When we write our science in passive voice, we are quite literally making it harder for a reader to understand and connect with it.

The 7th edition of the APA style guide [2] also emphasizes the role passive voice can play in causing unnecessary confusion for a reader. They emphasize the importance of intentionally choosing between active and passive voice, depending on whether you want to emphasize the people acting or the recipient of the action. Which seems to bring us back to where we started - that passive voice is used for scientific writing because it is the SCIENCE that matters, not the scientist. But is that true? When the public is feeling increasingly divorced from science, when expertise is seen as suspicious or not trustworthy, when discipline after discipline is being called upon to reckon with its own personal history of erasing the work of women, minorities, and other marginalized groups, do we really want to perpetuate a writing style that insists we literally disappear?

Science is performed by people, not abstractions. We’re shopping in local grocery stores, worrying about the state of the housing market, and trying to decide if fragrance-free detergent is really that important, just like everyone else. Scientists are living next door to the same people who question their expertise, sending their kids to the same schools as people who think we’re all owned by “big pharma”, and agonizing over the safety of our loved ones as they move through the same public spaces as people who think vaccines are dangerous but raw milk is safe. Are we really benefitting ourselves and society by making it easier to pretend the people who do that work aren’t really there? By hiding? By making our research that much harder to connect to because we’ve framed it as something that happens in some psychologically distant space? Science is for everyone, it connects everyone, and it’s done by people who are just like everyone else. It’s real and relatable and inspiring. We should write it that way.

1. Chan, E.Y. and Maglio, S.J. (2019) The Voice of Cognition: Active and Passive Voice Influence Distance and Construal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219867

2. American Psychological Association (2023) Let’s get active: Active voice writing guide. Let’s Get Active: Active Voice Writing Guide