The active life

We live our life in the active voice. We’re born, learn to crawl, and soon take our first steps towards our parents, arms outstretched. After a few years we go to school and then, before you know it, we’ve left for college. Life moves quickly: we fall in and out of love, build our career, maybe watch our own kids grow up. If we’re lucky, we get to spend our autumn years travelling the world, tending a garden, and grumbling about inflation. We’re the main characters in our own story, a story that’s driven by propulsive verbs and striking nouns.

A different picture emerges when we read the academic literature. Here, things just seem to happen in a vacuum, absent any real drama. The data was collected. The interviews were transcribed. The argument has been made. You wouldn’t know that there are people behind the article, people just like you, people who pulled up their sleeves and got their research done in the face of administrative obstacles, personal setbacks, and numerous false starts and dead ends. All that effort, all those juicy human details, are smothered by the passive voice.

Academics love to use the passive voice. There’s something comforting about a grammatical structure that allows us disappear completely. It feels good to retreat from the spotlight, to let our research to do all the talking. It’s a way of saying, ‘we’re not responsible for our ideas – our words are’. But of course, it’s a ploy. We haven’t really disappeared. We’re still there, like a child who puts their hands over their eyes and thinks they can’t be seen. 

Some academics are attracted to the passive voice because they imagine it lends their work an air of scientific objectivity. Unfortunately, that air is stale. We usually find the passive voice in method sections, making everything dank and stuffy. Here’s an extract from an ethnographic study about master data management (MDM), published in the Journal of Enterprise Information Management: 

Diary entries were made weekly and whenever MDM-related issues were observed. In addition to observations, the first author’s impressions and reflections were documented. To complement the diary, different kinds of project documentation were also utilized: procurement documentation, project plans, monthly status reports, and a set of memos from the working group, steering group, project portfolio group, stakeholder groups, and kick-off and closing seminars. Between the two projects, memos from the IT development group and the architecture group were also used. Finally, some internal documents were utilized, such as information management strategy, business intelligence (BI) status report, and working materials of the status report. (Vilminko-Heikkinen and Pekkola, 2017) 

Now that’s what I call ‘passive-aggressive’! Diary entries write themselves and reams of documents fly out of the filing cabinet, as if by magic. There’s a single reference to a real person (the first author), but they’re not really doing anything – they’re having something done to them (their impressions and reflections were documented). Presumably the first author was hooked up to a miraculous contraption that could read their mind and transcribe their thoughts. 

Here’s how the authors could have formulated this passage in the active voice: 

The first author wrote a diary to keep track of MDM-related issues and to jot down her thoughts and impressions. To complement the diary, she used different kinds of project documentation: procurement documentation, project plans, monthly status reports, and a set of memos from the working group, steering group, project portfolio group, stakeholder groups, and kick-off and closing seminars. Between the two projects, she examined memos from the IT development group and the architecture group. Finally, she analyzed internal documents, such as information management strategy, business intelligence (BI) status report, and working materials of the status report. 

In the revised passage, the cause-and-effect is clear. It’s the first author who’s doing the hard empirical work of keeping a diary and collecting the documents (the second author is nowhere to be found). Now, I don’t know who did what – I’m just taking an educated guess. But the lesson is this: the active voice reveals more than the passive voice. So don’t be shy, just tell the reader what you did and how you did it. 

There are occasions when you’ll want to reach for the passive voice, but remember that it’s largely a question of emphasis. If you want to accentuate the person (or thing) to whom something is happening – a victim of circumstance, if you will – then use the passive voice. Like this: All that effort, all those juicy human details, are smothered by the passive voice. The passive voice conveys a lack of agency, a sense of powerlessness. And that’s not how we normally conduct our research. 

So, most of the time, write life as you intend to live it: actively.