The passive voice: what British and American authorities actually say

The passive voice: what British and American authorities actually say

Authors writing in English as an additional language tend to bring the passive voice with them. Sometimes it comes straight from the conventions of their first language, where impersonal constructions carry the authority of scholarship. Sometimes a translator carries it across by following the source syntax too closely.

Either way it lands in an English manuscript, where reviewers and copy editors treat it with suspicion.

That suspicion has a history. It is worth knowing, because the reasoning behind it is older and more specific than “the passive is bad.”

Start with a sentence built to collect every complaint at once:

It is assumed that when a text is written in the passive voice, matters are presented in a vague and inadequate manner, and the reader is deprived of the possibility of understanding them.

The opening already causes trouble. It is assumed by whom? By style authorities, by editors, by everyone?

The rest keeps the trouble going. A text is written by whom, a novelist or a physicist? Who presents matters in a vague and inadequate manner, the author or the construction itself? And who did the depriving? Is the passive the cause of the reader’s confusion, or a symptom of it?

The grammar answers none of that. You can work it out by reading slowly. But readers rarely read slowly. They move through hundreds of sentences and give each one a second or two. In a text where the passive dominates, a reader misses things and never notices the missing.

The British line

British authorities object to the passive because it hides who acted. Orwell reads that hiding politically, and Gowers warns civil servants off impersonal phrases like it is felt. Two costs run underneath: the sentence gets heavier, and the reader spends attention reconstructing the agent instead of following the argument.

George Orwell made the case politically. Politics and the English Language (1946) catalogues the habits that bureaucratic writing had pushed into English prose, and treats them as tools for blurring thought and excusing indefensible policy. The passive earns a place on that list because it hides the agent.

Write the study was conducted in 1984 and nobody has to own the study. Orwell thought that kind of hiding had consequences well beyond style. His fourth rule for writers is blunt: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

Earlier British writers had made a quieter version of the same argument. In The King’s English (1906), H. W. and F. G. Fowler set out the standard that anyone who wants to write well should aim to be “direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid,” and they spend much of the book working through the roundabout constructions that get in the way of it.

Ernest Gowers turned the principle into an instruction for people who write for a living. Plain Words (1948) was written for British civil servants, and its advice on the passive is specific:

Do not use the impersonal passive, with its formal unsympathetic phrases such as ‘it is felt,’ ‘it is regretted,’ ‘it is appreciated.’

Gowers then explains what the reader loses. “How feeble is the sentence, ‘It is thought you will now have received the form of agreement’,” he writes, setting it next to I expect you will have received the form of agreement by now. And he names the effect these constructions have on a reader: “Your correspondent wants to feel that he is dealing with human beings, not with robots.”

Two objections sit inside all of this. One is about sound. Passive sentences are heavier, more distant, less pleasant to read. The other is about transmission. A reader who has to reconstruct the agent is spending attention on the sentence rather than on the argument.

The British metallurgist Robert Cahn extended the argument to scientific prose in a 1987 essay, arguing that the impersonal passive lets a researcher dress up a personal judgment as a general finding. It is assumed that gives a claim the appearance of objectivity that the claim has not earned. A practiced reader notices, and reads the construction as a place where the author is covering thin ground. Cahn’s essay is hard to obtain, so take this as a summary rather than his exact wording.

The American line

American style guides push harder. Strunk and White head Rule 10 with Use the active voice, then concede inside the same rule that the passive is often convenient and sometimes necessary. Read as a whole, Rule 10 gives you a strong default and a short list of places where the passive is right.

American guides tend to state the rule harder.

The Elements of Style (1959) is the reference point. Rule 10 is titled “Use the active voice,” and the argument under it is brisk: “The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.”

The same rule then grants the passive standing room, in a sentence that gets quoted far less often than the heading above it: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” Strunk and White go on to show cases where the passive is the correct choice, usually because a particular word has to be the subject of the sentence.

So the famous American ban turns out to be a strong default with documented exceptions. Anyone quoting The Elements of Style as an outright prohibition is quoting the title of the rule and skipping the rule.

Three decades later, George Gopen and Judith Swan took the argument into the laboratory. “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) reads real passages from real journals and shows what happens to comprehension when the verbs stop naming actions. Their diagnosis:

Each of us has to make a personal interpretive guess; the writer no longer controls the reader’s interpretive act.

The cost lands on the reader, who ends up, in their phrase, using “most of our energy to discern the structure of the prose rather than its substance.” A reader in that position cannot evaluate your hypothesis. They are still parsing your sentence.

Where Steven Pinker complicates the picture

Pinker does criticize the bureaucratic prose that buries agents, and he also argues that the blanket rule against the passive is wrong. On his account the passive controls what the reader looks at: in a birdwatching column it holds the heron in view while the observer stays out of the frame.

The Sense of Style (2014) is often listed alongside Orwell and Strunk as another voice against the passive. Pinker’s actual position is more useful than that.

He does criticize the bureaucratic and legal prose that buries agents under layers of passive construction. He also spends a good deal of the book arguing that the blanket rule is wrong, and that the style manuals repeating it have misdiagnosed what the passive does. His example is a birdwatching column, where the passive holds the heron in the reader’s field of view while the observer stays out of it.

The passive, on this account, is a device for controlling what the reader looks at. Used without thinking, it points attention nowhere.

Two conventions of academic prose

Two conventions collide here. In many academic cultures the researcher steps back and impersonal constructions signal scholarly seriousness. English-language academic writing assumes the opposite arrangement: a paper is one author’s move in an argument other people are also having, and readers want to see who is claiming what, and on what basis.

The gap between conventions is real, and it catches authors out.

In many academic cultures outside the anglophone world, impersonal and formal constructions are the marks of scholarly seriousness. The researcher steps back. The phenomena do the talking. The passive helps produce that effect, and a manuscript full of it reads as properly objective.

English-language academic writing runs on a different assumption. A paper is one author’s contribution to an argument that other people are also having. Readers expect to know who claims what, on what evidence, against whom. Active constructions serve that expectation, which is why they dominate even in the hard sciences, as Gopen, Swan, and Cahn all show.

An author who carries the first convention into English does not read as objective. They read as evasive.

What to do

Write in the active voice, and use the constructions English allows you that many languages withhold: this article argues, the data suggest. Keep the passive for moments when the process itself is what the reader should be watching. Watch the introduction and the conclusion above all, and make sure a person is visible there.

Write in the active voice. English gives you a piece of help here that many languages withhold.

In a good number of academic traditions, an inanimate noun cannot govern a verb of saying or thinking. English has no such restriction. This article argues that, the data suggest, Chapter 3 examines and the model predicts are all standard, and in academic prose they are preferred. The only requirement is that the reader can tell which text you mean and who wrote it.

The more careful answer is that no rule survives every sentence. Almost every authority quoted above says so. Gopen and Swan say it outright: “There can be no fixed algorithm for good writing, for two reasons.” They add that the best writers break reader expectations on purpose, and that the breaks work because the rest of the prose meets those expectations: “Our best stylists turn out to be our most skillful violators; but in order to carry this off, they must fulfill expectations most of the time, causing the violations to be perceived as exceptional moments, worthy of note.”

So use the passive deliberately. Describing an experiment, you can set up the conditions and the preparation in the active voice, then shift to the passive for the process itself, where the reader’s attention belongs on what happened rather than on who set it going. That works when it is rare. It stops working when it is your default.

One place to watch above all others: the introduction and the conclusion. Those are the sections where a reader decides what you think and whether you are worth arguing with. Put a person in them.

If you would like an editor to go through a manuscript with this in mind, request a quote.

• Cahn, R. W. (1987). “A Particular Way with Words,” in Artifice and Artefacts: 100 Essays in Materials Science (Bristol: Institute of Physics, 1992).
• Fowler, H. W., and F. G. Fowler (1906). The King’s English (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
• Gopen, G., and J. Swan (1990). “The Science of Scientific Writing,” American Scientist 78(6): 550–558.
• Gowers, E. (1954). The Complete Plain Words (London: HMSO; first published as Plain Words in 1948).
• Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language.
• Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Viking).
• Strunk, W., and E. B. White (2014). The Elements of Style (Boston: Pearson; first published in 1959).