Maintain perspective and flowĪ rule of thumb in writing is to keep the same subject (character) within each paragraph of your story.
But it can be a helpful tool for developing a good story by maintaining perspective and flow, and by controlling who or what the story is about. Passive voice is less direct, less bold, and less concise than active voice. It infuses your writing with “action”, making your reader feel excited about your work-and you. It gives you persuasive power in fewer words than passive voice. “Nature journals prefer authors to write in the active voice (‘we performed the experiment.’) as experience has shown that readers find concepts and results to be conveyed more clearly if written directly.”Īctive voice is more than just clearer. More recently, and with good reason, there has been greater support for writing in the active voice, even by prestigious journals such as Nature. You can’t change those facts by changing the writing voice. However, objectivity comes from how you treat your data, not how you treat your writing. Objectivity is important for good science. This argument suggests that writing in the passive voice keeps you at a distance from your data so that you can be objective about your work. An unbiased viewpoint encourages a world view and an open mind, surely prerequisites for good science.” By standing at a distance, an unbiased viewpoint is much more likely to be reached. “Using the passive voice in scientific writing allows the researcher to stand at a distance from his or her work. This view was described in a 1996 Nature paper: Scientists have been trained to be objective in their work, and they believe that their objectivity must come through in their writing. Why do scientists use passive voice? Why would they choose the less powerful storytelling tool? Passive Voice Gives a (False) Sense of Objectivity As a result, they will not enjoy reading your writing, and your story will be less clear and compelling. If they need to repeatedly fill in gaps, even subconsciously, you will sap their energy. Who did the counting? While the answer may seem implied, the reader must fill in that gap.
And to make matters worse, a scientific writer will often omit the subject to make the sentence more concise: The cells were counted.īy omitting the subject (“by the scientist”), the writer leaves the sentence open-ended. The second example is longer and less clear. You do not question who did what, and you can visualize the action because it immediately follows the subject. Passive: The cells were counted by the scientist. In other words, passive voice is when the subject of a sentence receives the action, while active voice is when the subject does the action. With passive voice, the order of information is reversed: goal-action-character. This order creates a clear, concise, and compelling story. They have concrete characters that perform vigorous actions to achieve a goal: character-action-goal. Good stories are compelling and memorable. We know that telling a good story is a powerful way to communicate information. But the passive voice carries a price: it weakens the story. During the 20th century, researchers focused on writing objectively, divorcing themselves from their work by describing their actions in the passive voice. Passive or active voice? Scientists have debated this question for decades.
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