![]() ![]() Active voice is when the subject of the sentence performs the action of the story. Maximise your publication success with Charlesworth Author Services.Ĭharlesworth Author Services, a trusted brand supporting the world’s leading academic publishers, institutions and authors since 1928.We’re going to have to throw a few grammar terms at you for this next bit.įirst, let’s define active voice. However, particularly in the Discussion section of a paper, using the active voice can improve the flow of your writing and help it to have greater engagement, which is a key aim of writing. The passive voice can be appropriate in the Methods and Results sections.Using the active voice changes the emphasis of a sentence, and usually makes it shorter it also often means that it will contain ‘I’ or ‘we’.The subject of a passive sentence has the action performed on it in an active sentence, the subject performs the action.Taking the first example given in this article, are the ‘participants’ or the ‘interviews’ more important? If you want to focus on the interviews, then the passive voice is appropriate because it puts them at the beginning of the sentence. Finally, it is always worth considering exactly what you want to emphasise.Similarly, in the Results section, describing your findings objectively may be simpler in the passive voice.For example, in the Methods section of a paper, what was done is probably more important than who did it.So, should the passive voice be avoided? No, the passive voice can be useful. (Learn more about writing your paper as a narrative in this article: Telling a story in your research paper) Deciding whether to use passive voice This can be important for how the reader reads, understands and values what is being communicated in the sentence, thus making the paper – and the scientific discoveries or innovations that it presents – more ‘accessible’. Note that with the active voice, the researchers themselves are ‘put back into the action of the research’. Active voice: Showing researchers in action We demonstrated that our selected combination of catalysts notably increased the efficiency of the reaction. If it is rephrased into the active voice, it becomes shorter, and is also more engaging: This could come across as overly ‘factual’, and some would call it ‘dry’. It was demonstrated that the efficiency of the reaction was notably increased by the use of the selected combination of catalysts. However, if you look at recent articles in high-impact-factor journals, you will see that it is now very common for researchers to use them.Ĭonsider this sentence, which might be found in the Discussion section of a paper: ![]() Some people believe that it sounds more ‘scientific’, but more recently this view has been falling out of favour.Īlso, people can be particularly reluctant to use the active voice if it means that a sentence will include first-person pronouns (‘I’ or ‘we’), and they may even have been taught (especially in certain countries/cultures) to avoid them altogether in scientific writing.
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