Hello, today we're thinking about active and passive voice. I'll define what it is, offer you a few examples, and we'll think about how to make choices about when to use active voice and when to use passive voice. This marks a contrast to the way that I was taught about active and passive voice as someone working within the field of English when it was taught to me. It was described as that which I should always strive for active voice in my writing and passive voice was wordy and inappropriate and clumsy. And I should kind of rigorously delete every example of passive voice in all of my writing. This is not what I'm sharing with you. [LAUGH] This is not what I want you to take away from this. I really want you to take away from this video that active and passive voice is another kind of choice that you make as a writer. And you want to think about disciplinary context, as well as primarily what you're trying to communicate in your writing. Whether you choice active voice or passive voice depends on what you're trying to say. So let's take a look at a few examples. Active voice and passive voice has to do with emphasis. It's where the action is happening in a particular sentence. Here is an example. The most influential op-ed in 2013 was written by Mueller. And in this example the emphasis is on the most influential op-ed. That's where, as a reader what you focus on. So here, Mueller takes kind of secondary importance, right? As a reader, what I'm getting from this is that I should be focusing on the influential op-ed maybe in 2013 but Mueller is sort of like a subsidiary level of focus. By contrast in the second sentence, Mueller wrote the most influential op-ed in 2013. Here, the emphasis is clearly as a reader, on Mueller, right? I'm focusing on Mueller's accomplishment. And here, this influential op-ed now has kind of secondary importance. So I can't say to you necessarily which version is better or prefered because these are out of context, I don't know what the purpose was of communicating this. So if this is coming in a letter of recommendation or an award of achievement that Mueller is getting, then probably we want to frame it in that way, right? because it's about Mueller and it's about her accomplishment. However, if this is more focusing on the nature of op-eds and op-eds ofinfluence. Maybe this would be the way that we would go. So disciplinary context plays a really key role here too, in addition to the emphasis. There are certain disciplines where passive voice is much more kind of standard. So the sciences and to a certain degree, the social sciences, you'll find passive voice much more in those disciplines and by in large, in the humanities, you'll probably find more instances of active voice. So, let's continue to think about how you'd make choices. Here's an example of active voice, Atkin argues that graphic representations help shape our understanding of ideas. And in this example, the emphasis is on Atkin arguing and what she's arguing about graphic representations. By contrast, a passive version of that sentence would have placed the emphasis elsewhere in a sentence. So here, it was argued by Atkin that graphic representations help shape our understanding of ideas. And here, the emphasis is actually not even on graphic representations. It's actually on it is the emphasis. In this case, I think it's pretty safe to say [LAUGH] that somebody would want to probably prefer this version to the passive voice version because it's putting the action where it belongs. Right, that Atkin is making this argument and this is what graphic representations, why they're important as opposed to kind of relegating it to an it, right? Which often it, is not what you want to emphasize in a particular piece of writing. So let's look at one more example where we can think about maybe, where a writer would make a different choice. Here's an active voice version of a sentence. Atkin, Comer, Erol, Font, Vidra, 18 graduate students, and 12 undergraduates all from Duke conducted the study. Okay, as with the sentence on the last slide, it certainly is kind of attributing action to where the action was right, with all these people. This is a lot of people and as a reader, I'm not sure do I need to know all of this. What I do need to know maybe is what's conveyed in the passive voice. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from Duke and this emphasizes the study itself which is probably what's important here. So often with the sciences it's not so important who mixed the chemicals for a certain experiment so much as that the chemicals were mixed, right? That's what's important about the methodology and so in the sciences especially, it's often more appropriate to use passive voice. But, again I want to emphasize active voice, passive voice, is about making choices. A way that you can identify when active voice or passive voice are happening. Often with passive voice, if you look for forms of the word to be, was, is a clear indicator that a passive voice is happening, not every time but often. So if you want to look through and find moments in your writing where you're using was and if it is a passive voice instance, then you can make choices about whether you want to revise that to be active or whether you want to keep it in the passive voice.
