Passive grammar (or just “the passive” if you prefer) used to confuse the life out of me when I first encountered it. At school, I was never taught what passive grammar looked like, how to form it or how to use it. In fact, it was only when I began teaching, that I actually learnt those things (essential if you want to teach English!), and only when I began teaching at university that I saw how the passive was used in academic writing.
The Confusion
When I was learning how to use passive grammar, what confused me initially was the idea of “voice”. The passive is not a tense but a “voice”, but what does that mean? Basically, when we speak we tend to use an “active voice”, which focusses on a person/people e.g. “I finished my essay today”. However, we can also change the sentence round to become, “My essay was finished today” – this is giving us the same information, but the voice is different as the sentence uses the “passive voice.” This means the focus is not on the person doing the action (which here would be the writer of the essay), but the thing that was completed: the essay.
Passive Grammar Helps Remove the Personal
Passive grammar is useful in academic writing because it removes the personal element (remember, we need to make our writing less personal, right?) and focuses on the ideas we want to convey. For example. we will often want to focus on research that has been done or what the results or conclusions of it are.
So, though we could write something such as, “Research by Jones and Ahmad (2025) on the effectiveness of the medical trials found that the results were inconclusive”, it would be more concise and more focussed to write, “The effectiveness of the medical trials were found to be inconclusive (Jones and Ahmad, 2025)”. Here we focus on what we want to tell the reader: that the medical trials were not decisive. We don’t need to focus on who did the research, as that is not important.
Using the Passive
Use the passive:
- When you want to focus on outcomes or results of an action and not the person/people doing it
- Or when you think the person/people doing it is unimportant or obvious to the reader, use the passive
To form it:
- you need the verb to be + past participle of a verb
- for example, “it was written“; “it has been suggested“; “it is achieved by…..”
But Don’t Overuse It
You may have noticed that when you review your writing on MS Word, it frequently has problems with passive grammar, and always asks you to use an active voice. However, though you should generally ignore this, there are times when you should not use the passive. For example, if you find your writing is too vague and the reader cannot tell who is doing an action, then using an active voice (writing like you might speak) is probably better. Elsewhere, you may want to emphasise particular organisations or people, as they may be important for your subject, so you could use more active language.
If you are unsure if you should use passive grammar or active grammar, then aim to use the passive as much as possible in academic writing, but not at the expense of clarity
Still Unsure
A lot of confidence with using passive grammar, depends on your awareness of it. Many international students who have learnt English, will probably have been taught how to form (i.e. create the structure) and how to use it. However, it is likely that many native English speaking students will not have been taught it, but may still use it, albeit without knowing.
By this, I mean that if you are a native English speaker, you may already use a range of phrases in your writing that are passive, but you may not actually recognise them as passive. For example, phrases such as, “It has been suggested“, “This theory has been widely accepted“, “The experiment was conducted on Monday”, are all passive (the words in bold are the passive parts). Therefore, it is not necessary to know how to form the passive, as your familiarity with it may already be there.
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