Writing in the Sciences: Use the Active Voice

Summary

This video from the USF Writing Commons, guided by Kristen Sonani from Stanford University, addresses the importance of using the active voice in scientific writing. It emphasizes how the active voice, which follows the structure "subject-verb-object," enhances clarity and readability. In contrast, the passive voice often obscures the subject and can make sentences awkward and harder to understand. Through various examples, Kristen demonstrates how converting passive sentences into active ones can simplify expression and clarify responsibility when writing academically.

Highlights

• Welcome to Week Two of Writing in the Sciences with Kristen Sonani of Stanford University! 🎓
• Active voice makes sentences clearer and more direct by following the subject-verb-object structure. 💡
• Passive voice can obscure responsibility, making sentences awkward and less engaging. 😮
• Convert passive sentences to active by focusing on who does what to whom — subject-verb-object! 🔄
• Using active voice in academic papers often makes the content more relatable and straightforward. 📚

Key Takeaways

• Active voice follows the subject-verb-object structure, making sentences clearer and more engaging. 🗣️
• Passive voice obscures the subject and can lead to awkward, ambiguous expressions. 🚫
• Practicing the mantra 'subject verb object' helps instill the habit of using active voice. 🧠
• Converting from passive to active voice involves identifying 'who does what to whom.' 🔍
• Scientific and academic writing benefits greatly from clarity and directness provided by the active voice. 🔬

Overview

Welcome to another insightful session with Kristen Sonani from Stanford University, brought to you by USF Writing Commons. In today’s lesson, Kristen walks us through the subtle yet impactful nuances of using the active voice in scientific writing. Say goodbye to passive voice pitfalls and embrace clarity and directness! 📖

Active voice is key for clarity - it follows the simple subject-verb-object order, which is how we naturally speak. This directness creates a more engaging and easier-to-digest read, especially important in the dense world of academic papers. Kristen encourages using the active voice to highlight agency and make writing more relatable and straightforward! ✍️

Kristen offers practical tips on transforming sentences from passive to active voice. By focusing on sentence structure — turning verbs active, and specifying subjects — writers can significantly enhance their work's readability. Embrace the active voice for a more authoritative and clear communication style in scientific and academic endeavors! 🚀

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Week Two In week two of 'Writing in The Sciences', presented by Kristen Sonani from Stanford University, the focus is on continuing the discussion from week one. The previous session provided an overview of three key principles of effective writing. This week, attention reverts to the first principle: eliminating unnecessary words and phrases to cut clutter in writing.
• 00:30 - 05:00: Principles of Active Voice The chapter discusses principles related to the use of active voice in writing. It emphasizes on focusing on verbs, choosing strong verbs, avoiding turning verbs into nouns, and ensuring the main verb is placed near the subject at the beginning of a sentence. The active voice is explained to follow the format of subject-verb-object, which is the standard way of communication.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Identification of Passive Voice The chapter discusses the importance of using the active voice instead of the passive voice in writing and speaking. It highlights how the passive voice can make sentences sound awkward and suggests that writers should habitually use the active voice, focusing on a subject-verb-object structure.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Examples of Passive Voice The chapter titled 'Examples of Passive Voice' delves into the structural differences between active and passive voice. It emphasizes that in the active voice, the typical structure follows 'subject verb object,' though sometimes it might just be 'subject verb.' In contrast, the passive voice rearranges this order to 'object verb subject' or merely 'object verb,' where the subject might be entirely omitted.
• 15:00 - 25:00: Converting Passive to Active Voice This chapter explores the differences between passive and active voice, highlighting how passive voice can be awkward in everyday conversation. The example 'she throws the ball' contrasts with the passive form 'the ball was thrown by her.' Despite being unnatural in spoken language, passive voice is often used in academic and scientific writing. The chapter aims to encourage more active voice usage in writing by demonstrating these differences.

Writing in the Sciences: Use the Active Voice Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 welcome to week two of writing in The Sciences I'm Kristen sonani from Stanford University last week we had an overview of three key principles of effective writing and we talked about the first of those which was cutting all the Clutter all the unnecessary words and phrases
• 00:30 - 01:00 from your sentences this week I'm going to focus on the latter two principles which both had to do with verbs so the first one is we're going to talk about the use of the active voice and then we'll talk about writing with verbs using strong verbs avoiding turning verbs into nouns and keeping the main verb of your sentence up near the subject close to the beginning of the sentence so what is the active voice so the active voice follows the format subject verb object and this is the way that we normally talk right we
• 01:00 - 01:30 say she drives the car she throws the ball it's a very normal way of talking and a normal way of writing and if you as you'll see in a minute if you change over to the passive voice it starts to sound very awkward so I really want you to start thinking about using the active voice and some of you may have learned picked up along the way the habit of using the passive voice so to help break you of that habit I'm going to suggest that next time you sit down to write you actually kind of have this Mantra in your head you think subject verb object
• 01:30 - 02:00 subject verb object subject verb object and just kind of get that beaten into your head uh and remind yourself that you're supposed to write subject verb object so again the active voice is just subject verb object subject verb object and sometimes it's just subject verb it doesn't always have to have an object all right so contrast that to the passive voice what does the passive voice look like so the passive voice inverts that structure it goes object verb subject or sometimes just object verb and the subject is completely
• 02:00 - 02:30 removed out of the sentence and you can see it's a very kind of awkward way if you try to talk this way uh you would say instead of she throws the ball you would say the ball was thrown by her or the ball is thrown by her and you can see that's a really awkward way to talk and so we never talk in the passive voice but yet somehow when we sit down to do academic or scientific writing a lot of us start to U you know talk in the passive voice in our writing and is
• 02:30 - 03:00 also very awkward in writing the classic example of the passive voice is the following sentence mistakes were made now notice that's in the passive voice because the object what was made was the mistakes so the object starts that sentence then we get the passive verb were made and then there's no subject so we don't know who made the mistakes right they just kind of fell out of thin air they just happened mistakes were made nobody's responsible so the passive voice is a
• 03:00 - 03:30 way that you can talk that sort of abdicates your responsibility right and so that's one of the reasons that it exists in the English language you can recognize the passive voice by looking for the passive verb and that verb will have two parts to it it will have a form of the verb to be that's is are was were be been or am and then it will have a main verb that will be in the past tense and that main verb has to take an object it's what we call a transitive verb uh
• 03:30 - 04:00 it it has to take an object or you won't be able to invert it into the passive voice so a verb that takes an object would be again like she throws the ball so the verb throws in that sentence takes the object the ball contrast that to the sentence she runs where you're just talking about the athletic activity of running if you say she runs in that sentence run does not take an object so there's no way to turn that into the passive voice however if you said she runs the company then you could turn that into the passive voice because in that sentence run takes an object the
• 04:00 - 04:30 company so then you could say the company is run by her so that's the passive voice and uh you can recognize it by looking for again a form of the verb to be connected to the past tense of the main verb and what is the what are the two B verbs just to remind you in case you've forgotten those are is are was were be B and am and sometimes the be or the bin is paired with something else like you might see could be or shall be or will be be or has been
• 04:30 - 05:00 but you're looking for one of those to be verbs so how do you recognize the passive voice so you're looking for the passive verb that is a verb that's a a Tob verb connected to another verb in the past tense or you can just look for the structure object verb subject so you kind of figure out what's the object of the sentence what's the subject and have those been inverted and again sometimes you will just see object verb that's an easier sentence to recognize as being in the passive voice because since there's is no subject it's pretty obvious that
• 05:00 - 05:30 that's in the passive voice so you're looking for object verb subject or just object verb and I'm going to try to get you in the habit of recognizing the passive voice so that you can turn it back into the active voice so here's an example of a passive voice sentence I took this sentence from Strunk and white uh it's a very classic little book if you want to pick up something else to read for this class it's called the elements of style it's very short it's very good uh so if you have some time and want to pick something up to read I think you can
• 05:30 - 06:00 even get that one uh online so they uh wrote the sentence my first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me so you can see when you read that out loud how awkward and funny sounding that is right we don't talk in the passive voice so you can recognize it as the passive voice because it starts with the object so you think about what was remembered the visit was remembered so the visit is the object of the verb remember so here's my object then you get a passive verb and again you can
• 06:00 - 06:30 recognize the passive verb because you have a form of the verb to be so we've got will be and then you've got the past tense of uh the verb that takes the object so that's the remember so here's the verb and then you get the subject at the end of the sentence that's me right the subject is me in a sentence so we get object verb subject so how would you turn that back into the active voice well of course you would just say I will always remember my first visit to Boston that's a much more natural way to speak and yet that in a lot of academic and
• 06:30 - 07:00 scientific literature we do this in our writing we we give that first version my first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me so you can see how how funny that is and also how hard on the reader so here's another example of a passive voice sentence so it says she is loved which of course brings up all sorts of uh interesting questions like who is loving her um this is an example of a passive voice sentence in which there is no subject so you can recognize
• 07:00 - 07:30 the the passive verb again because we have the to be verb is and then we have loved which is the past tense of love which is a verb that takes an object you usually love something so we get our passive verb there and then you think about well what's the she in this sentence the she is not the one doing the loving so she is not the subject she is the one being loved so she is the object of the love and who is loving her well we don't know that that's that remains a mystery
• 07:30 - 08:00 so this is an example of a passive voice sentence where the subject has been completely removed and leaving it to be you know somewhat of a mystery here's another example of a passive voice sentence in which the subject has been omitted from the sentence so it says cigarette ads were designed to appeal especially to children so notice again we've got the passive verb the were designed and the object what was designed is the cigarette ads now who designed them well when you read this it's almost like they
• 08:00 - 08:30 just kind of were designed that way it just happened it wasn't intentional nobody did it nobody's responsible it just happened that way so you can see again why people might want to use the passive voice in some cases it takes away the subject it takes away the responsible party so contrast to that passive voice sentence to the active voice version which would be something like we designed the cigarette ads to appeal especially to children so you can see that when you turn things into the active voice it forces you to then have
• 08:30 - 09:00 a responsible party so how do you turn the passive voice back to the active voice so first of all you have to recognize when a sentence is in the passive voice that's the first step then to turn it back to the active voice you have to ask yourself the question who does what to whom who's the subject of that sentence who's the object and you want to then invert that sentence back to subject verb object in some cases there won't be a subject some of the editing exercises we're going to do there won't be a subject so you might have to guess you
• 09:00 - 09:30 know that the subject is we or the authors of the paper so here's an example of a passive V voice sentence that we can turn back into the active voice so it says by applying a highresolution 90° bending magnet Downstream of the laser electron interaction region the spectrum of the electron beams could be observed so you can see that that's the passive voice because well first of all we don't have a subject here we don't know who's doing the observing we know what was observed the Spectrum of the electron beams but
• 09:30 - 10:00 we don't know who is doing the observing then we've got the could be that's the form of the verb to be and then we've got the observe the past tense of a verb that takes an object so to turn this one back to the active voice we kind of have to guess who's the subject of the sentence well if this was coming out of a scientific manuscript probably it's the authors who are writing the paper so they could say something like the active version would be we could observe the spectrum of the electron beams by applying a high resolution 90 degree bending magnet so you have to identify
• 10:00 - 10:30 the subject in this case is probably the authors and they can use the word we in their paper we could observe this so turn that into the active voice so here's another example it says general dysfunction of the immune system has been suggested at the Lucy level in both animal and human studies okay so again this one's a little bit more hidden but if you kind of look at it carefully you can recognize it as passive voice because we've got the has been that's that's the form of the verb
• 10:30 - 11:00 to be the suggested and what's the object what's being suggested what's being suggested is this dysfunction of the immune system what's doing the suggesting in this case is the studies the animal and human studies so to turn this one back into the active voice we would put the animal and human studies first and have them suggesting this conclusion so we would say both human and animal studies suggest that diabetics have General immune dysfunction at the Lucy level and
• 11:00 - 11:30 notice that when I wrote it in the active voice I I added this word uh that diabetics it actually kind of forced me to be a little less ambiguous and the active voice often forces you to be more specific about what you're talking about so I've now put that one into the active voice it's the studies that are suggesting this finding and I actually had to give it a little bit more specificity there it's this particular finding in diabetics so here's another example increased promoter occupancy and
• 11:30 - 12:00 transcriptional activation of p21 and other Target genes were observed okay so again this is passive voice without a subject so we don't know who was doing the observing obviously from the context of the paper we we could guess that in this case I'm going to assume it was the authors of the paper who were doing the observing so we would turn this into the active voice by saying we observed increased promoter occupancy and transcriptional activation of p21 and
• 12:00 - 12:30 other Target genes and that's just a much more easyto read sentence and all I've done is taken that first sentence which was in the passive voice and turned it into the active voice and just that little change makes a big difference in the readability of that sentence so here's another example in the passive voice the activation of calcium channels is induced by the depletion of endoplasmic reticulum calcium doors so you can see that the
• 12:30 - 13:00 passive voice also is kind of like the cause and effect come backwards right it's the effect was was caused by the the Cause right so um it kind of inverts everything so we have to again think about well what's the subject here and what is the object so the subject what's doing the inducing is the depletion of endoplasm reticulum uh calcium stores what's being induced is the activation of calcium channel so we're going to want to turn that around and turning
• 13:00 - 13:30 this around you'll see is going to make this sentence a lot easier to read and a lot clearer so we would say depleting calcium from the endoplasm reticulum activates calcium channels and notice that I got rid of one of these uh extra words here because we had you know that the depletion was inducing the activation and when you put it in the active voice you can see that you've kind of got these two verbs induced in well activation is a a noun that could have been a verb so I took that
• 13:30 - 14:00 activation and turned it back to the verb and I got rid of the induced part because I didn't need to kind of say activates twice so that makes that sentence a lot shorter a lot crisper so depleting calcium from the endoplasmic reticulum activates calcium channels it's very direct so that's one of the nice things about the active voice is it kind of forces you to be direct it gives you a lot of opportunities to cut extra words and to be really direct so here's another example in the passive voice it says additionally it was found that
• 14:00 - 14:30 pre-treatment with antibiotics increased the number of supershedders while immunosuppression did not so notice that how that sentence starts it was found that so again we don't know who did the finding um it's you know probably the authors of the paper uh you could turn that into the active voice simply by saying we found that pre-treatment with with antibiotics increase the number of supershedders uh however you could even be a little a little bit more direct you
• 14:30 - 15:00 could even do a little better than that because probably this is in the results section of their manuscript and they probably don't need to start every sentence with we found that or it was found that they can just say what was found so they can actually you can cut out that whole little kind of clearing your throat it was found that and just say directly what was found so in that case the pre-treatment with the antibiotics becomes the subject it's the pre-treatment with the antibiotics that increases that does the action that increases the number of Suh Setters so we could rewrite this one in the active voice getting rid of completely the
• 15:00 - 15:30 whole found verb to pre-treating the mice with antibiotics increased the number of Super shutters while immunosuppress suppression did not the proceeding program is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr University please visit us at med.stanford.edu