Active and Passive Voice

What Are Active and Passive Voice?

Active and passive voice describe two fundamentally different relationships between a sentence’s subject and its verb. The choice you make between them is not just grammatical — it is rhetorical. It determines where your reader’s attention lands and how confident your writing feels.

In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action. The structure flows naturally: Subject → Verb → Object. The doer comes first. The action follows. The recipient comes last. This is how most English sentences are built, and for good reason — it is the most efficient and transparent structure the language offers.

In passive voice, the subject of the sentence receives the action. The structure reverses: Object (now the grammatical subject) → to be + past participle → (by + agent, optional). The recipient of the action leads. The doer either appears at the end, in a “by” phrase, or disappears altogether. This is why passive voice is sometimes called “the voice that hides the actor.” As George Mason University’s Writing Center puts it, passive voice can make your writing seem flat when overused, and it is something professional writers are routinely urged to limit.

What Does Active Voice Mean?

Active voice places the agent — the person, group, or entity doing the action — in the subject position of the sentence. This gives the writing immediacy and accountability. You know exactly who is responsible for each action. The University of York’s Academic Language Guide notes that active voice creates unambiguous sentences, assigns clear responsibility, and typically requires fewer words than the passive equivalent. All of these things matter when you are writing essays and want your argument to land with force.

What Does Passive Voice Mean?

Passive voice restructures the sentence so the recipient of the action occupies the subject position. The agent either moves to the end — introduced by the preposition “by” — or is omitted entirely. Passive constructions always use a form of the verb to be (is, are, was, were, will be, has been, had been) combined with the past participle of the main verb. This combination is the grammatical signature of passive voice.

The Grammatical Structure at a Glance

Understanding the exact grammatical mechanics of active and passive voice makes it easier to identify and convert either construction. The passive is not formed arbitrarily — it always follows a predictable pattern: a form of to be in the appropriate tense, plus the main verb’s past participle. This is what word processors and grammar checkers detect when they flag passive constructions.

Notice the pattern in the passive column: every passive construction contains a form of to be followed by a past participle. That is the grammatical marker. Once you can spot that pattern reliably, identifying passive voice in your own writing becomes a matter of seconds rather than guesswork. For a deeper look at how grammar shapes your essay’s clarity, the guide on common grammar mistakes in student essays covers related pitfalls worth avoiding.

Active and Passive Voice Examples Across Essay Types

Rules without examples are hard to internalize. What follows are active and passive voice examples drawn from the kinds of writing college and university students produce most often: argumentative essays, research papers, lab reports, literary analyses, and personal statements. Each pair shows the same idea expressed in both voices so you can feel the difference directly.

Argumentative Essays

In argumentative writing, active voice almost always wins. Your thesis advances an argument. Arguments need agents. Who claims what matters. Passive voice in argumentation creates distance between the writer and the claim — which is exactly the wrong effect when you are trying to persuade. Argumentative essay writing depends on conviction, and passive constructions quietly drain that conviction out of your prose.

The active version is 13 words and hits hard. The passive version is 17 words and meanders. The agent — governments — is buried. The obligation feels diluted. This is why professors consistently prefer active voice in argumentative writing.

Research Papers

Research papers are more nuanced. The introduction, discussion, and conclusion sections benefit from active voice because they present claims, interpretations, and arguments. The methodology section, however, is one of the few places where passive voice is not just acceptable but standard. The reason is that the methodology section describes procedures, and the focus properly belongs on what was done, not who did it. This convention exists because it makes experiments more readily reproducible — any reader can follow the described steps regardless of who performed them originally.

Both are grammatically correct. The passive version is simply the conventional standard in scientific methodology writing, which is why journals like Nature and the American Journal of Botany allow it in methods sections while preferring active voice elsewhere. Editage Insights covers this distinction in detail for research manuscript writing.

Literary Analysis Essays

Literary analysis essays call for active voice without exception. You are making an argument about how a text works. Your interpretation needs to own its claims. Passive voice makes literary analysis feel noncommittal — as though you are reporting observations rather than advancing a reading. The guide on literary analysis essays reinforces this point: the writer’s voice must be present and confident throughout.

Personal Statements and College Application Essays

Personal statements live and die by specificity and agency. You are the subject of every meaningful sentence. When you write in passive voice in a personal statement, you accidentally make yourself a passive recipient of your own life. Readers — admissions officers, scholarship committees — want to see what you did, chose, initiated, overcame. College admission essays that lead with active constructions project confidence and self-awareness. Those that rely on passive constructions can feel evasive.

Journalism and News Writing

Journalism operates by the same logic as argumentation: active voice, strong verbs, agent first. News writing instructors at programs like Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism drill active construction from day one. There is an important nuance, though. Journalists sometimes use passive voice deliberately when they cannot confirm who performed an action — “Five buildings were destroyed” is accurate when the cause is unclear. It is passive not out of weakness but out of precision. The same principle applies to academic writing: passive voice serves accuracy when the actor genuinely is unknown.

When to Use Active Voice and When to Use Passive Voice

The most damaging myth in student writing is that passive voice is always wrong. It is not. Passive voice is a legitimate grammatical construction with specific, legitimate uses. The problem is default passive — choosing it out of habit or a misguided notion that it sounds more academic or formal. What sophisticated writers do is choose their voice intentionally.

Use Active Voice When…

• You want clarity and directness. The reader should know immediately who is doing what. Active constructions remove ambiguity about agency and responsibility.
• You are making an argument or claim. Arguments need owners. “The data suggest climate change is accelerating” is stronger than “It is suggested by the data that climate change is accelerating.”
• You are writing narrative or descriptive prose. Active voice creates motion and energy in storytelling. It keeps the reader moving forward.
• You are presenting your own actions or contributions. This is especially true in personal statements and research papers. APA Style’s official guidance explicitly encourages the use of “I” in the active voice when describing your own research actions.
• You want shorter, more efficient sentences. Research by Lubis et al. (2024) confirms that active constructions take less time to read and are easier to remember than passive equivalents.
• You are writing for a general audience. Active constructions are more accessible. Passive voice requires more cognitive processing because the reader must reconstruct the logical order of agent, action, and recipient mentally.

Use Passive Voice When…

• The actor is genuinely unknown. “The painting was stolen sometime between Tuesday and Thursday.” We do not know who stole it. Passive voice is honest and appropriate here.
• The actor is irrelevant to the point. “The medication was administered at 8:00 a.m.” Who administered it matters less than that it happened and when. This is common in medical records and clinical writing.
• You are writing scientific methods sections. Passive voice in methods sections focuses attention on the procedure rather than the researcher, which is the convention in natural sciences. “The solution was heated to 80°C” is standard. APA Style notes this is an appropriate exception to the active voice preference.
• You want to emphasize the recipient of an action. “The scholarship was awarded to a first-generation student” puts the award and recipient at the front, which may be exactly the emphasis you want in context.
• You are being diplomatically vague. “Mistakes were made” is passive voice used deliberately — it acknowledges error without assigning blame. This is a rhetorical choice, not a grammatical one, and it is worth knowing even as you recognise it is often evasive.
• You are maintaining stylistic consistency. Some disciplines — legal writing in particular — have conventions that favour passive constructions in certain contexts. Match the genre conventions of your field.

What Do APA, MLA, and Chicago Actually Say?

Students often wonder whether style guides prohibit passive voice outright. None of them do. What they say is more nuanced — and worth knowing precisely, since assignments often specify a citation style.

APA Style (7th edition, Section 4.13) recommends active voice for most writing but explicitly permits passive voice when appropriate — specifically when the focus is on the recipient of an action, such as in describing an experimental setup. It states: “Use the active voice as much as possible to create direct, clear, and concise sentences, especially when you are writing about the actions of people.” It does not prohibit passive; it cautions against overuse.

MLA Style takes a similarly nuanced stance. It acknowledges passive voice is acceptable when the actor is irrelevant, such as in recording factual events. However, it notes that active voice research links to higher marks for analytical depth in student essays. The signal is clear: in literary and humanities writing, active voice projects stronger analytical command.

Chicago Style (used heavily in history, arts, and humanities) is pragmatic. It prefers active voice for clarity but acknowledges that some academic disciplines have passive voice conventions. Historians writing in the Chicago style use active voice when narrating events and passive voice when describing historiographical positions or established facts. For essay guidance on these style frameworks, the resource on conducting research for academic essays includes style guide references.

How to Identify Active and Passive Voice in Your Own Writing

Knowing the definition of active and passive voice is different from being able to spot them reliably in a paragraph you wrote twenty minutes ago. The following tests give you a systematic way to check your own writing — no grammar software needed, though you can use it as a second check.

The “To Be” Test

Scan your sentences for forms of the verb to be: is, are, was, were, been, being, will be, has been, had been. If you find one, look at what follows it. If a past participle follows directly (reviewed, written, completed, analyzed, discovered), you almost certainly have a passive construction. The presence of to be + past participle is the grammatical fingerprint of passive voice.

The “By Zombies” Test

This technique is a genuine pedagogical tool used in college writing programs across the United States. After your verb, try adding the phrase “by zombies.” If it makes grammatical sense — even if it sounds absurd — your sentence is passive. Passive constructions can always accept an agent in a “by” phrase, whether or not one is currently present.

Ask: Who Is Doing the Action?

The simplest diagnostic is conceptual: read your sentence and ask, “who is performing this action?” If the answer is your grammatical subject, you are in active voice. If the answer is someone or something else (or if there is no answer because the actor has been omitted), you are in passive voice. This is the quickest test for reviewing your writing at the paragraph level.

When reviewing an essay, read each sentence and underline the verb. Then ask who is performing that action. Mark passive constructions with a P. At the end of the review pass, count how many Ps you have and assess whether each is serving a clear purpose or is simply default passive. This practice aligns with what the guide on effective proofreading strategies recommends — targeted sentence-level review passes, each with a specific grammatical focus.

How to Convert Passive Voice to Active Voice: Step-by-Step

Converting passive voice to active voice is a learnable skill. It is not simply a matter of “rewriting” — there is a systematic process that works reliably for virtually any passive construction. The following steps walk through that process, with examples at each stage.

Worked Conversion Examples

The following examples show the full conversion process on sentences drawn from different academic writing contexts. Notice how each conversion reduces word count and sharpens the sentence.

Each of these conversions follows the same five steps. Practice these on your own drafts and the process becomes automatic. For related guidance on how sentence construction affects essay flow, the article on mastering transitions in essays covers how sentence-level choices cascade into paragraph-level clarity.

Common Misconceptions About Active and Passive Voice

A significant amount of student confusion about active and passive voice comes from oversimplifications that got repeated in secondary school and stuck. The following are the most common myths — and what the actual evidence and style guidance says.

Myth 1: “Passive Voice Is Always Wrong”

False. Every major style guide — APA, MLA, Chicago, the AMA Manual of Style — acknowledges appropriate uses of passive voice. The problem is not passive voice itself but overuse and default passive. Passive voice used strategically — in methods sections, when the actor is unknown, for specific emphasis — is correct, conventional, and sometimes the better choice. As the University of New Mexico’s Core Writing Grammar Guide notes: “there are some instances where the passive voice is a better choice than the active.”

Myth 2: “Passive Voice Sounds More Academic”

This myth is genuinely harmful and completely backwards. It arose from the observation that academic writing contains more passive voice than everyday speech. But that is a description of a convention in certain disciplines (especially natural sciences), not a prescription for all academic writing. In fact, humanities professors, law professors, and business school faculty consistently prefer active voice because it projects analytical confidence. The modern trend in scientific writing is also shifting toward active voice. Journals like Nature now actively encourage “we investigated” over “it was investigated.” Editage documents this shift in detail for researchers.

Myth 3: “If a Sentence Has ‘Was’ or ‘Is,’ It’s Passive”

Not necessarily. Linking verbs — forms of to be used to connect a subject to a description or state — are not passive constructions. “The experiment was successful” uses “was” as a linking verb connecting subject to adjective. That is not passive voice. Passive voice requires to be + past participle of an action verb: “The experiment was conducted successfully” is passive. Knowing this distinction prevents the common error of “correcting” perfectly fine active sentences that use linking verbs.

Myth 4: “You Should Never Write ‘I’ in Academic Papers”

This is one of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions in student writing. It is directly connected to active versus passive voice because students taught to avoid “I” often compensate by overusing passive constructions — “it was observed that” instead of “I observed that.” APA Style explicitly encourages the use of “I” (and “we” for co-authored work) when describing your own research actions. It calls this clarity and appropriate attribution. Many British and American universities have updated their style guidance to reflect this. When you need to avoid first-person for a specific disciplinary reason, that is a deliberate choice — not a blanket rule. For help navigating this in essays, the guide on how to avoid passive voice in academic essays addresses this directly.

Myth 5: “Grammar Checkers Always Correctly Flag Passive Voice”

Grammar software flags passive constructions, but it cannot judge whether passive voice is appropriate in context. A grammar checker will flag “The samples were collected from three river sites” in a methodology section — but that passive construction is entirely conventional and correct. Always evaluate flagged passive constructions against the context: is the actor unknown? Is this a methods section? Is this a conventional phrase in your discipline? If the answer to any of these is yes, override the software. Editing tools support human judgment — they do not replace it. The guide on revising and editing college essays covers this distinction between tool-assisted and human editing.

What APA, MLA, and Chicago Say About Active and Passive Voice

Every major citation and style framework has a position on active and passive voice. Understanding these positions matters because your assignment instructions typically specify a style guide — and the style guide’s preferences should shape your drafting choices from the first sentence. Here is what each says, precisely.

APA Style (7th Edition)

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association addresses voice in Section 4.13. Its position is explicit: use active voice as the default, especially when describing what researchers do. The rationale is readability and clarity — active constructions communicate more efficiently and reduce the cognitive load on the reader. However, APA does not prohibit passive voice. It specifically identifies methodology sections as an appropriate context for passive voice, where “the focus is on what was done rather than who did it.” It also permits passive voice when describing an experimental setup where the focus is on the recipient of an action. The key phrase in APA guidance is “use active voice as much as possible” — not “use active voice exclusively.” The APA Style official page on active and passive voice is the authoritative source on this guidance.

MLA Style

The Modern Language Association Handbook, used primarily in literature, language studies, and humanities writing, does not include an extended section on voice but its general guidance is consistent: prefer active voice for analytical clarity. MLA-style essays — literary analyses, comparative essays, cultural criticism — are argument-driven, and arguments need agents. The passive voice in MLA-style writing tends to appear in two places: when reporting established facts (“The novel was published in 1949”) or when describing historiographical positions. Beyond those contexts, MLA writing should default to active. Research suggests active voice is associated with higher analytical scores in MLA-style assessments, which is consistent with the style’s emphasis on interpretive depth and authority.

Chicago Style

The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) is used in history, arts, and many humanities disciplines. It takes a pragmatic approach: prefer active voice for clarity, but recognise that disciplinary conventions vary. History writing, which narrates events and interprets evidence, uses active voice for narrative sections and may use passive voice for historiographical descriptions. Legal writing, which frequently cites Chicago, has its own passive voice conventions in certain document types. Chicago’s general principle is that voice should serve clarity — use the voice that makes the sentence clearer, not the one that sounds more formal.

The AMA Manual of Style

The American Medical Association’s style guide, used in medical and health sciences writing, explicitly lists improving readability as one reason to prefer active voice. Like APA, it acknowledges that scientific writing has historically overused passive voice and that the trend is moving toward active constructions, particularly in results and discussion sections. Methods sections remain the primary domain of passive voice in medical writing. This matters for students writing nursing papers, public health reports, and medical case studies. For nursing-specific writing guidance, the nursing assignment help resource addresses voice and format requirements across clinical writing tasks.

Active and Passive Voice Across Academic Disciplines

Voice preferences are not uniform across all disciplines. What earns marks in an English essay may not be the convention in a chemistry lab report. Understanding how active and passive voice operate within your specific field of study is as important as knowing the grammatical rules themselves.

Sciences: Biology, Chemistry, Physics

Natural science writing has the most accepted passive voice usage of any academic discipline — specifically in methods sections. The logic is sound: when reporting how an experiment was conducted, the focus should be on the procedure, not on the experimenter. Any reader should be able to replicate the experiment; the researcher’s identity is irrelevant to that goal. However, even in the sciences, this convention is changing. Results sections, discussions, and conclusions in major journals now strongly prefer active voice because the claims made in those sections need clear ownership. “We found that…” is replacing “It was found that…” across leading scientific publications.

Social Sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science

APA Style dominates social science writing, and APA’s guidance is clear: active voice for most writing, passive only where appropriate. Psychology papers discussing research actions should use “We recruited 120 participants” rather than “120 participants were recruited.” Sociology essays making claims about social structures should use active constructions. The guide on qualitative and quantitative data analysis covers how voice choices also intersect with how you report findings from different research paradigms.

Humanities: History, Philosophy, Literature

Humanities disciplines are the most consistently active-voice-preferring domains in academia. History essays narrate and interpret; active voice is essential for both. Philosophy essays argue positions; active voice claims them. Literary analysis essays advance readings; active voice owns them. In these disciplines, passive voice is most often a symptom of hedged thinking — and professors in these fields are particularly attuned to it. The art of persuasion in essays addresses the rhetorical dimension of this: how voice choices affect the ethos (credibility) you project as a writer.

Business and Economics

Business writing at the graduate level — MBA programs, business school reports, case studies — strongly prefers active voice. Business communication prizes clarity, brevity, and accountability. Passive constructions add words and remove accountability. A business recommendation that says “The marketing strategy should be revised” is weaker than “The team must revise the marketing strategy by Q3.” Accounting and economics reports are more varied — they follow the conventions of their underlying methodology. For students writing business analyses and case studies, the resource on case study essay writing is directly relevant.

Law

Legal writing has one of the most nuanced relationships with voice of any academic discipline. Statutes and contracts often use passive constructions by convention — “The defendant shall be notified within 30 days” is the standard form, not a stylistic choice. But legal memos, briefs, and academic law review articles strongly prefer active voice. Legal writing professors at institutions like Harvard Law School and Oxford’s Faculty of Law emphasize active constructions as tools of persuasion and precision. “The court held that…” is active and direct. “It was held that…” is passive and evasive.

Practical Tips for Mastering Active Voice in Your Academic Essays

Knowing the rules of active and passive voice is the first step. The second step is actually applying them under the time pressure of an assignment deadline. The following practical strategies help you write in a stronger, more active voice from the draft stage — not just in the editing pass afterward.

Start Sentences With Strong Subjects

The single most effective habit for maintaining active voice is choosing your sentence’s subject before you choose anything else. Ask: who or what is performing this action? Name that agent first. “Researchers at MIT developed…” is active from its first word. “A new development was made by researchers at MIT…” drifts passive because the sentence started with the wrong noun.

This connects directly to the craft of writing strong topic sentences. Topic sentences that lead with agents set an active tone for the entire paragraph that follows. The opening word or phrase of each paragraph creates a template the rest of the paragraph tends to follow.

Use Strong, Specific Verbs

Active voice lives in the verb. Weak, vague verbs — “makes,” “has,” “gets,” “does” — produce limp sentences regardless of voice. Strong, specific verbs — “establishes,” “demonstrates,” “challenges,” “refutes,” “reveals,” “proposes” — give sentences energy and precision. When you edit for passive voice, also edit for verb strength simultaneously. Replacing “it was shown that” with “the data reveal” does two jobs at once: it activates the voice and strengthens the verb. The guide on writing concise sentences covers verb selection in depth.

Read Your Draft Aloud

Passive constructions have a characteristic sound — they often feel sluggish when read aloud, with the action delayed and the sentence trailing off into “by [agent]” phrases. Reading your draft aloud reveals passive constructions that your eye glosses over silently. It also reveals overlong sentences and awkward constructions that look acceptable on the page but feel cumbersome when spoken. Many professional writers use this technique as their primary editing tool.

Do a Dedicated Voice-Check Pass

When editing an essay, do not try to catch everything in a single pass. Dedicate one editing pass exclusively to voice. Read every sentence. Mark every passive construction with a symbol. Then decide, for each marked sentence, whether the passive is justified (methods section, unknown agent, deliberate emphasis) or should be converted. This targeted approach catches far more than general editing. It also trains your eye to recognize passive constructions more quickly over time, which reduces default passive in your drafting.

Understand When to Stop Converting

Converting every passive construction to active is as much of a mistake as never converting any of them. Knowing when to stop is part of the skill. If you have converted a sentence to active voice and the result sounds awkward, unnatural, or loses important information, that passive construction may belong there. Good writing is not mechanical application of rules — it is judgment. The goal is a piece of writing that is clear, precise, and appropriately voiced for its genre and context. That sometimes means keeping a passive sentence exactly as it is.

Active and Passive Voice in Special Writing Situations

Beyond standard essay types, students encounter active and passive voice decisions in a range of specific writing situations. Each has its own conventions and complications worth addressing directly.

Thesis Statements

Your thesis statement must be in active voice. Always. The thesis is the heart of your argumentative claim — it is the sentence that declares what your paper argues and who (implied: you) is making that argument. A passive thesis statement — “It will be argued that social media contributes to political polarization” — sounds noncommittal and avoids the direct claim. An active thesis — “Social media platforms amplify political polarization by algorithmically rewarding emotionally charged content” — declares a specific claim with a specific agent and mechanism. Professors reading your introduction want to find a thesis they can agree with, disagree with, or push back on. A passive thesis gives them nothing to push against. For help constructing strong thesis statements, the guide on writing a thesis statement that stands out addresses this directly.

Abstracts

Research paper abstracts have a more mixed tradition regarding voice. Some disciplines expect fully passive abstracts (“Methods were designed to examine…”). Others — particularly following updated APA and journal guidelines — now prefer active abstracts (“We designed methods to examine…”). The shift is toward active voice even in abstracts because it reads more clearly and credits the researchers directly. Always check your target journal’s guidelines or your assignment’s style specification before deciding.

Email and Professional Communication

Professional emails should be active. They should be clear. They should assign responsibility and state actions plainly. “The report will be sent by Friday” is passive and slightly evasive. “I will send the report by Friday” is active and accountable. In professional and academic email communication, active voice projects competence and reliability. This matters for students communicating with professors, internship supervisors, and department administrators.

Scholarship Essays

Scholarship essays are personal statements — and personal statements need to project agency, ownership, and initiative. Passive voice in scholarship essays signals that the writer either lacks confidence or is not fully present as the subject of their own narrative. Scholarship committees at institutions like the Gates Foundation, Fulbright, and Rhodes Trust read thousands of applications. Essays that project clear agency and active voice stand out. The resource on mastering scholarship essays addresses this in the context of competitive scholarship writing.

Reflective Essays

Reflective essays are perhaps the writing type where students most naturally drift into passive voice — partly because reflection involves processing experience rather than making claims, and partly because it can feel vulnerable to claim ownership of your own growth in the direct, active way the form requires. But the best reflective writing is deeply agentive. It places the writer as the active subject of their own experience and learning. “I changed my mind about…” is far more compelling than “My mind was changed by…”. The guide on how to write a reflective essay takes this principle into the full structure of reflective writing.

How-to and Instructional Writing

Instructional writing — process essays, lab procedure guides, how-to articles — is an interesting case. True passive procedural writing (“The solution should be heated to 80°C”) is common in scientific contexts. But instructional writing aimed at a general reader typically uses the imperative mood, which is implicitly active: “Heat the solution to 80°C.” The subject (“you”) is implied rather than stated, but the construction is active — the agent is presumed to be the reader, performing the action directly. This is the clearest, most direct form of instructional prose and is always preferred in writing aimed at a non-specialist audience.

Key Organizations and Resources on Active and Passive Voice

The teaching and codification of active and passive voice in English academic writing is anchored in a handful of authoritative organizations, style guides, and university writing centers. Knowing these resources helps you go beyond this guide and engage directly with the primary sources.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) — Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

The Purdue OWL is arguably the most widely used free grammar and writing resource for English-language students in the world. Its coverage of active and passive voice is comprehensive, practical, and freely accessible. The OWL is housed at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana — a top research university known for its engineering and sciences programs — but its writing resources serve students across every discipline. Its guidance on active/passive voice aligns with APA and MLA style recommendations and is updated regularly to reflect current usage norms.

The American Psychological Association (APA) — Washington, D.C.

The APA, headquartered in Washington, D.C., publishes the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, now in its seventh edition. The manual’s position on voice (Section 4.13) is the defining standard for social science writing and influences style guidance across dozens of related disciplines. The APA Style website provides free access to guidance on active and passive voice at apastyle.apa.org.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) — New York, New York

The MLA, based in New York City, is the professional organization for scholars of language and literature in the United States. Its MLA Handbook (9th edition) is the style standard for literary studies, language studies, and many humanities courses across American and British universities. The MLA’s voice guidance reinforces active construction for analytical writing while acknowledging appropriate passive use in specific contexts.

University Writing Centers

The writing centers at George Mason University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of York (UK), McMaster University (Canada), and hundreds of other institutions publish free, peer-reviewed writing resources on active and passive voice that are cited across the academic world. These centers employ trained writing tutors and specialists who work directly with students on the same issues this guide addresses. If you have access to your institution’s writing center — whether at a U.S. university like NYU, UCLA, or UChicago, or at a UK institution like the University of Edinburgh or UCL — use it. In-person feedback on your specific writing is the fastest route to improvement.

Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style”

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, first published in 1959 and still in print, contains the most-cited single prescription on voice in the English language: “Use the active voice.” Strunk and White argue that active voice is “more direct and vigorous” than passive and that writers who use passive voice too often “put their sentences into the passive voice […] from habit, from not recognizing passive voice when they see it.” While some contemporary linguists have critiqued The Elements of Style for oversimplification, its core voice guidance remains influential in U.S. writing education at both secondary and university levels.

Frequently Asked Questions About Active and Passive Voice