A PEGforum thread called ‘active voice vs passive voice’ also considered author’s voice and academic voice, as well as plain language and faculty guidelines. 

Question

Ilsette van Straaten asked:

In academic editing, where do you draw the line between correcting passive voice to active voice?

I’m currently editing a master’s thesis that consists of 90% passive-voice sentences. In this case, it creates unnecessary wordiness, makes responsibility unclear, or produces a cumbersome sentence. As language editors, do we fix them (without altering emphasis, meaning or the author’s voice, of course)?

Answer 1: Case by case 

An editor who would prefer to be anonymous said succinctly:

Change passive voice only when it impairs clarity, conciseness, or accountability.

Sometimes passive is OK. For example,

• Participants were recruited from three hospitals.
• Data were analysed using NVivo.

Ask for the university’s guidelines for editors if they have one.

Answer 2: Plain language and academic voice 

Christien Terblanche pointed out considerations of plain language and academic voice:

 I agree that the passive is harmless in some cases, like the examples provided above. However, there is a worldwide move towards as much active voice as possible in academic writing. It has to do with two influences: The first is increased awareness of the value of plain language. The second is the shift in academia away from viewing the researcher as inherently objective to recognising the researcher’s inherent subjectivity. This is an important matter.

The use of passive voice had a job in academia. Its job was to create distance between the author and the reader to indicate the researcher’s inherent objectivity and distance from the subject matter. Now, the use of active voice acknowledges the author’s subjectivity and their own recognition of their subjectivity as part of their research rigour.

I find that second or third language users of English still write in the passive voice because they think of it as more formal and academic, but they are actually undermining their own academic voice by doing so. I therefore do not agree that it should be changed only where clarity is involved, but rather as much as possible. However, if at all possible, I would give the student the job of doing so, with the willingness to edit after they have put in the work.

Answer 3: Australia and the UK

Another PEG member brought some international insight:

Australian universities have adopted the guidelines of a PEG affiliate, the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd) which limit copyediting to the following:

• clear expression (e.g. removing ambiguity, wordiness and needless repetition)
• clear and logical connections between phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and sections
• correct use of grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation
• appropriate use of idiom, style, tone and inclusive language
• correct formatting of citations and references for sources and quoted material
• appropriate use of technical and specialised terminology, including discipline-specific terms, abbreviations and units of measurement
• clear, consistent and accessible presentation of illustrations and tables.

As a current doctoral candidate myself, it has been made very clear that the “voice” in the thesis is my own as author. I would therefore question whether the wholesale change from passive to active voice is within the remit of the thesis copyeditor, or whether addressing “clear expression” should be limited as described above by IPEd.

Answer 4: Author’s voice

Another PEG member agreed with Answer 3, adding:

I don’t think that we can change from passive to active, as this is often prescribed by the university. The voice is indeed the author’s, and even if we don’t like it, I think it would be wrong to do a wholesale change from “the researcher” to “i”, unless instructed to do so by the author.

The only time I make a consistent change is when the author has used tenses incorrectly. In fact, in the PhD I’m editing at the moment, the supervisor even told the student that the tenses needed to be corrected – and this is indeed the situation.

Answer 5: Let the client decide

Ilsette van Straaten replied to Answers 4 and 2:

Thank you for raising the issue of author’s voice. I agree that preserving the student’s own academic voice is fundamental, and I would certainly not advocate mechanically changing every passive construction to the active voice.

However, Christien’s post about plain language and the researcher’s changing role in academia (thanks, Christien — that was a paradigm shift!) has made me reconsider the idea that an editor should intervene only where the passive causes a problem with clarity.

As she points out, the preference for active voice in much contemporary academic writing is linked not only to plain-language principles, but also to changing ideas about the researcher’s role. The traditional passive often distanced the researcher from the research and created an impression of objectivity. In many disciplines today, however, researchers are expected to acknowledge their own role and subjectivity rather than write themselves out of the research entirely.

For that reason, I think there is a distinction between indiscriminately rewriting passive constructions and finding an excessive or unnecessary reliance on the passive voice. Where the latter is weakening the candidate’s academic voice, I would regard it as a legitimate stylistic issue to flag.

I particularly like Christien’s suggestion that, where the problem is widespread, the student should ideally do the rewriting. The editor can explain the issue, provide representative examples and then edit the student’s revisions. That seems to me a safe way to improve the writing while ensuring authorship stays firmly with the candidate.

So, I would not apply a blanket ‘passive to active’ rule, but I would also not restrict intervention solely to instances where clarity is affected.

Answer 6: Distance vs subjectivity and how to tell the client

Rosalie Kingwill joined in:

Christien’s issue about distance was not to suggest changing to ‘I’, it was a conceptual point about how passive voice creates a distance and active voice can make it more subjective. 

If I were editing a piece with over-use of passive, I would correct the most obviously clumsy ones and for the rest,  I would comment in a note to the author saying, ‘It would be much better if you wrote it like this …’  and give an example, and then simply point out others. Repeated passive voice can be very detrimental to tone, style and meaning, and a great impediment to clarity unless it is crucial or integral to the style or meaning. It is often simply laziness or bad habit.

Answer 7: What the journals want

Answer 8: ChatGPT on 3 engineering faculties’ guidelines 

Ilsette told the forum:

I just found out that the University of Pretoria engineering guideline specifically states that the report should be written in the passive voice. So, the thesis I am editing now would indeed need to follow it. But this clearly is not a UP-wide language rule.