Most of the researchers believe that passive voice is more journalistic and suits the journals better.
Another school of though prefer active voice because they think that you should accept your responsibility of the article and the performed research.
Still, it is a controversial issue in academic writing. What do you think?
Based on my experience, passive voice is more preferable, in general, than active voice in research writing. From one point of view, passive voice is more useful in academic writing than active voice, because it allows writers to highlight the most important findings within sentences by placing them at the beginning of the sentence. In addition, the link https://unilearning.uow.edu.au/academic/3avi.html may be useful concerning the question.
Regards
I have used a narrative style in most of my academic papers with a passive voice.
Based on my experience, passive voice is more preferable, in general, than active voice in research writing. From one point of view, passive voice is more useful in academic writing than active voice, because it allows writers to highlight the most important findings within sentences by placing them at the beginning of the sentence. In addition, the link https://unilearning.uow.edu.au/academic/3avi.html may be useful concerning the question.
Regards
@Aristidis Matsoukis
Dear Sir! thank you for your valuable comments and the provided link is really useful.
Dear colleague
Thank to invite me to this question, I think Aristidis Matsoukis answered you a good one
One or two decades ago, authors used passive voices. However, it was found that active voices are stronger and more impressive. Therefore the trend has changed. Now, it is advised to maintain a balance between the two types, passive and active. As a rule of thumb, you may use active voice mostly in Abstract, Introduction, and Discussion, and use passive voice mostly in Methods and Results sections of the manuscript.
I prefer a passive voice - it seems to be more suitable in serious scientific journals and publications. There are pros and cons arguments in the link below. They believe that a passive voice is OK in the following cases:
- if the reader is aware of who the actor is;
- in expository writing, where the goal of the discussion is to provide background, context, or an in-depth explanation;
- if the writer wants to focus on the object or the implications of the actor’s action; or
- to vary sentence structure.
As far as I am concerned, those cases above are exactly the things I assune to have in my publications.
Here is the link:
http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/scholarlyvoice/activepassive
@Farrokh Habibzadeh
Your information is really helpful.Can you please provide me some reference to affirm your thoughts? It will be more useful for my paper. Thanks in advance
@Len Leonid Mizrah
thank you for sharing useful information. These publications are also worthwhile.
Also, the link https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/events/professional-development/Slides/2015-04-09-active-passive.pdf contains interesting tips with regard to the question.
Regards
I am in favour of passive voice because using it in paper writing allows the researchers to stand at a distance from his/her work. By standing at a distance, an unbiased view point is much more likely to be reached. An unbiased view point encourages a world view and open mind surely prerequisite for good science.
The use of passive voice encourages disciplined writing it is therefore more in demand.
@Arvind Singh
Yes, you are right Sir!. By standing at a distance, an unbiased view point is much more likely to be reached. I also affirm your point of view.
@S. Sarvade
Thanks for your comments.These references are helpful to prove the importance of passive voice in research.
Hi,
It seems that passive voice suits more the experimental papers while active voice is designed more for theoretical papers. The active voice adds rigor to the writings when the argument does not have some quantitative proof.
@Avishag Gordon
I agree with you, quantitative research needs to explain using passive voice.
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