Poland was invaded in 1939, thus initiating the Second World War. To spot passive sentences, look for a form of the verb to be in your sentence, with the actor either missing or introduced after the verb using the word “by”: The grammar checker in your word processor can help spot passive sentences, though grammar checkers should always be used with extreme caution since they can easily mislead you. At first, you may want to ask for help from a writing instructor.

But you can still go back through your essay hunting specifically for passive sentences. If you now use a lot of passive sentences, you may not be able to catch all of the problematic cases in your first draft. Since the car was being driven by Michael at the time of the accident, the damages should be paid for by him. And since they are usually longer than active sentences, passive sentences take up precious room in your paper: They can make the reader work unnecessarily hard. įinally, passive sentences often sound wordy and indirect. The telephone was invented in the nineteenth century. Some students use passive sentences to hide holes in their research: Research has been done to discredit this theory.

Too many passive sentences can create confusion: Īcademic writing often focuses on differences between the ideas of different researchers, or between your own ideas and those of the researchers you are discussing. Passive sentences can get you into trouble in academic writing because they can be vague about who is responsible for the action:īoth Othello and Iago desire Desdemona. To learn more about the use of passive voice in the sciences, visit our handout on writing in the sciences. Check with your instructor or TA whether you can use the first person “I” or “we” in your lab reports to help avoid the passive. Scientists often now prefer active voice in most parts of their published reports, even occasionally using the subject “we” in the Materials and Methods section. Note: Over the past several years, there has been a movement within many science disciplines away from passive voice. The passive voice places the emphasis on your experiment rather than on you. In these sentences you can count on your reader to know that you are the one who did the dissolving and the titrating. This solution was then titrated with hydrochloric acid. The sodium hydroxide was dissolved in water. Passive voice is often preferred in lab reports and scientific research papers, most notably in the Materials and Methods section: You are writing in a scientific genre that traditionally relies on passive voice.It is still the only treatment available for diabetes.

Insulin was first discovered in 1921 by researchers at the University of Toronto. You want to emphasize the person or thing acted on.You want to be vague about who is responsible:.Īn experimental solar power plant will be built in the Australian desert. The cave paintings of Lascaux were made in the Upper Old Stone Age. In some sentences, passive voice can be perfectly acceptable. The uncertainty principle was formulated in 1927. In a passive sentence, we often omit the actor completely: In a passive sentence, the person or thing acted on comes first, and the actor is added at the end, introduced with the preposition “by.” The passive form of the verb is signaled by a form of “to be”: in the sentence above, “was formulated” is in passive voice while “formulated” is in active. In an active sentence, the person or thing responsible for the action in the sentence comes first. Passive: The uncertainty principle was formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. In English, all sentences are in either “active” or “passive” voice:Īctive: Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle in 1927.

What is active voice in writing