Listen up, and listen good. The passive voice is not the root of all evil, because while Michelle may indeed delight Juanita, instead of Juanita being delighted by Michelle, she does not:
[ul]
[li]Omit to train librarians in a technical discipline such as engineering, when the agent is immaterial [/li][li]Identify system requirements, when the agent was just mentioned in the preceding line[/li][li]Show, below, the conceptual design of a “Task” object in an automated scheduling system,[/li][li]Use a brute force algorithm[/li][li]Further diagnose patients[/li][li]And so on[/li][/ul]
Seriously, this is a graduate level project. I’m not writing about John giving Jane the ball. And I know they mean well, wanting me to write in an active, urgent style that, you know, just grabs ya! But if I want to describe several related behaviors that characterize a subject, I don’t want to have to introduce <the thing> in the first sentence and then have to being every subsequent statement with “It”, or “<The thing>” so as to avoid the passive voice. I don’t believe it’s necessary to name or refer to the subject in every sentence, which is, as far as I know, the only way to avoid the passive voice, other than the more lugubrious indefinite subjects “One” or “They”. In all honesty I believe that “Horses are shot, aren’t they” is not any worse than, “They shoot horses, don’t they?”.
I know, there’s probably a way to turn this part of the grammar check off, but I get so tired of seeing the sguiggly green warning line all over my document. I just wanted to vent.
The first thing I do whenever I work on a new computer is turn the grammar check off. Spell check is fine, but the grammar check obviously wasn’t intended for technical writing.
Nah, you’d have to do something like this: “Passive voice does not make evil babies.” (active) → “Evil babies are not made by passive voice.” (passive).
The passive voice is slowly making its way out of scientific writing but, much like anything in the sciences that has a history of long use, is still taught and used. There are good reasons to switch to active voice in the sciences. For example, you can get really torturous sentences trying to use passive voice. And it’s questionable that it’s really worth going to all the trouble to remove the human from the process anyway. Nobody would write about his latest attempt in cooking all in the passive voice, so why write about an organic synthesis experiment in passive voice?
Yeah but when I’m writing an assignment in the very very very very last minute and there’s no way in hell I’ll have time to read it, the grammar check comes in handy. I might have to sift through a couple of false alarms but there’s a good chance it might pick up a sentence fragment when I’m typing half asleep. The worst part is, when the green lines are seen all over the paper by the professor.
How do you deal with situations where you don’t want to name the subject? Granted, you can probably reconstruct some sentences to avoid phrases like “is processed” or “are trained”, but in many cases the resulting sentences aren’t any better. For instance I could write, “Most librarians do not receive any training in…”, but that’s not one bit better than “are not trained in…”. Maybe part of the problem is that it’s still not usually considered proper to use contractions in academic writing. “Don’t get trained…” might work better if they were. I think also that the passive voice issue is inherent in many verbs that come up in academic writing, because the agent is usually immaterial. Process, train, run, build–very often we don’t care who is doing these things, it only matters that they are being done (or not). We also don’t care who or what shows, in Fig. 3 below,….
There’s always the royal “we”, but I have never felt comfortable with that unless I am working with a team.
In that case, you’ll want to go into the Auto-Correct options as someone suggested and unclick most of the things the grammar checker looks for, and also the Proofing options and deactivate the “Check Errors as You Type” feature.
But I’d still just deactivate Grammar Check entirely. It’s wrong much, much more often than it’s right.
Because the reader cares about the experiment, not the experimenter.
As an undergraduate, I took a course based on the University of Chicago’s writing program. The rule we were taught regarding the passive voice was very simple: the grammatical subject of a sentence should be whatever the sentence is about. Sometimes that requires the passive voice.
The problem with the passive voice isn’t that it’s bad in and of itself, but that it sounds fancier than the active voice, and so people who want you to think that they’re very smart tend to overuse it. That doesn’t justify taking it away from the rest of us.
Think about the realism we could introduce into scientific writing by eliminating the passive voice and accurately describing the subjects…
A sleep-deprived third-year doctoral student cultured the bacteria in an agar gel.
An egomaniacal tenured professor interpreted the data analyses to indicate that the experimental results supported his hypothesis.
An undergraduate work-study student thinking of majoring in biology sterilized the laboratory apparatus.