Using the Active and Passive Voice Appropriately in On-the-Job Writing

Abstract

Many current technical writing handbooks still advise writers to avoid the passive voice except in certain limited situations, primarily when the agent is unknown, understood, unimportant, or better left unnamed. However, a growing body of research indicates that the passive voice has a broader array of rhetorical functions. To identify some of the functions of the passive, as well as the active, voice, the frequencies of active and passive verbs were determined in 185 documents written by twenty-eight civilian and military members of the U.S. Air Force. The frequencies were similar to those in similar types of documents written by nonacademic writers in previous studies. In addition, writers were queried about their reasons for choosing active or passive verbs. While the results of the study confirmed the importance of agency in the choice of active or passive, they also revealed numerous other factors that were significant in writers' choices. The most significant reasons for choosing one type of verb over another were the voice of the verb, organizational requirements, audience awareness, efficiency, genre, euphony, personal preference, agency, emphasis, and topic-comment flow. These results suggest that technical writing instruction and handbooks should promote general principles for the use of both active and passive verbs rather than advising against the use of passive verbs.

The Use of Passives and Impersonal Style in Civil Engineering Writing

“…Understanding features that express objectivity and impersonality in engineering writing is limited not only by a lack of systematic text analysis but also by the tendency of the existing analyses to count features in different ways. Studies have differed in whether they count all verbs or only finite (tensed) verbs (e.g., see Riggle, 1998), whether or not they count imperatives (cf. Riggle, 1998; Ding, 2001), and whether they include verbs in both main and subordinate clauses or only main clauses (cf.…”

“…Studies have differed in whether they count all verbs or only finite (tensed) verbs (e.g., see Riggle, 1998), whether or not they count imperatives (cf. Riggle, 1998; Ding, 2001), and whether they include verbs in both main and subordinate clauses or only main clauses (cf. Ding, 2001; McKenna, 1997).…”

Simplification for Efficiency: Development of Schema-Based Chinese-English Interpretation Training Programs

“…However, commercial communication is no less formal and standardized than medical communication. On one hand, the passive voice is commonly used in commercial communication to underline the official nature [13,15,21]. On the other hand, complex sentences are preferred to simple clauses in commercial communication to strengthen the coherence [1].…”

Improving the Clarity of Journal Abstracts in Psychology

“…This finding is similar to one that we found when looking at the readability of wellknown and less well-known articles in psychology (Hartley, Sotto, and Pennebaker 2002). The view that scientific writing involves a greater use of passives, the third person, and the past tense is perhaps more of a myth than many people suspect (see, e.g., Kirkman 2001;Riggle 1998;Swales and Feak 1994). Indeed, the APA (2001) Publication Manual states, "Verbs are vigorous, direct communicators.…”