Grammatical Analysis: Passive Voice in Academic Writing

Sam van Etten

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Professor Maggie M. Werner

October 2016
Passive Voice in Academic Writing
Academic writing is unique among the various written genres in that it is
intended exclusively to convey information. This direct, practical objective allows
academics to make much more liberal use of the passive voice than many other genres
can. Mircel Rejmanek and David M. Richardson make excellent use of both the passive
voice and its ability to remove the subject from sentences discussing why the genus
Pinus represents an ideal opportunity for researchers to study invasive species. Over the
course of a brief two-sentence passage, Rejmanek and Richardson exclusively use the
passive voice and completely omit any phrases that would be considered the subject
were these sentences presented in an active voice. This style of writing allows Rejmanek
and Richardson to hide any indicators of human-induced bias from the reader while
simultaneously presenting their data in the most concise manor possible.
The first sentence, Life history characters have been studied in detail, contains
an object (the life history characters) and an action (studied), but no subject. Were this
sentence changed to its active form, the authors would have to present the audience
with a subject who actually did the studying referred to in this sentence. The inclusion
of such a subject, however, would likely further complicate and potentially compromise
the validity of Rejmanek and Richardsons paper. A critic or reviewer could undermine
the points made Rejmanek and Richardsons paper by identifying flaws with the subject

Rejmanek and Richardson would have had to include had written this sentence in an
active voice. By using a passive voice, they eliminate the need for a subject altogether,
and ground the papers findings in their own research, as opposed to having to rely on
the research done by someone else.
The second sentence in this passage, Reliable records about individual
introductions in terms of failures, survival, growth, regeneration and spread are
extensive, contains more information than the previous sentence did, but functions
similarly to the first sentence analysed. Again, the use of the passive voice allows
Rejmanek and Richardson to gloss over who kept the reliable records they refer to, and
focus instead on the contents of those records. Here, however, we see the passive voice
serving a second purpose as well. This sentence contains a significant amount of
information, which it is able to convey quickly and directly. This concision comes from
the use of the passive voice. Instead of taking up space by including the names of
researchers who kept track of the five different records that act as the object in this
sentence, Rejmanek and Richardson use the passive voice to simply omit those words
altogether and save space on the page. This allows the reader to quickly understand the
point the sentence is making, and then move on.
The passive voice is undoubtedly useful in academic prose for a number of
reasons. Over the course of these two, concise sentences, we see Rejmanek and

Richardson use passive sentence structures to help eliminate notions of bias in their
work, and convey large amounts of information in short spaces.
Work Cited
Rejmanek, M. and Richardson, D. M. (1996), What Attributes Make Some Plant Species
More Invasive?. Ecology, 77: 16551661. Retrieved from
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/2265768/abstract