Passive Voice in Scientific and Technical English Writing

CEFR B1-B2 • Grammar • When to choose passive over active in technical and scientific writing

"Avoid the passive" is bad advice for technical writing

Many English style guides tell you to "always use the active voice." That advice is wrong for scientific and technical writing. In a methods section, an incident report, or a security advisory, the passive voice is often the correct choice — it shifts focus from "who did it" to "what happened." This page covers when to use passive, when to switch to active, and how to do both well.

The passive structure

Active: Subject + verb + object. "Marina ran the analysis." (Marina = subject)
Passive: Object + be + past participle (+ optional "by" agent). "The analysis was run by Marina." (analysis = subject)

Tense	Active	Passive
Simple present	runs	is run
Simple past	ran	was run
Present perfect	has run	has been run
Future	will run	will be run
Modal	should run	should be run
Continuous	is running	is being run

When passive is the right choice

1. The actor is unknown or unimportant

"The samples were stored at -80°C for six months." Methods section. Who stored them does not matter. Passive is correct.

"The bug was introduced in the v3.4 release." Postmortem. The "who" is sometimes deliberately omitted.

2. The action is more important than the actor

"The vulnerability has been patched in versions 3.4.1 and later." Security advisory. The patch is the focus, not who shipped it.

"The data was anonymized before analysis." Compliance statement. The fact of anonymization matters more than the engineer.

3. The actor is "we" (research papers, methods sections)

"The variables were operationalized using the standard scale (Berger et al., 2023)." Academic style. "We operationalized" works too, but passive is more conventional.

4. Universal rules and policies

"All deploys must be reviewed by a senior engineer before merge." Policy. Applies to anyone deploying — passive is impersonal.

"Customer data shall be encrypted at rest and in transit." Standard contract/SLA language. "Shall" + passive = formal requirement.

When active is better

1. The actor is responsible (and you want clarity on responsibility)

Weak: "Mistakes were made." (avoids responsibility) Strong: "We made several mistakes in the rollout." Active voice owns the action. Passive can read as evasive.

2. Direct user instructions

Weak: "The form should be submitted by Friday." Strong: "Submit the form by Friday." For instructions, imperative or active voice is clearer.

3. The actor is the focus of the story

Weak: "The migration was completed by Sandeep last night." Strong: "Sandeep completed the migration last night." If you want Sandeep to get credit, lead with Sandeep.

A side-by-side: scientific paper section

Methods (passive — appropriate)

"The samples were collected from three production environments. Each sample was tested using the standard cryptographic validation suite. Results were recorded in a centralized database. Outliers were flagged for manual review."

Discussion (active — appropriate)

"We found three primary classes of error in the sample. Our analysis suggests that the second class is responsible for 80% of the observed downtime. We recommend revising the deployment process to catch class-2 errors earlier."

The pattern in scientific papers: methods → passive (impersonal procedure). Results and discussion → active (you make claims, take ownership of conclusions).

Incident report: when passive is correct

In postmortems, passive lets you describe what happened without finger-pointing.

"An invalid configuration was pushed to production at 14:23 UTC." Names what happened. The engineer's identity will be in the postmortem details, but the headline is fact-focused.

"The error rate climbed from 0.3% to 2.8% within 90 seconds."

"A rollback was initiated at 14:31 UTC and completed by 14:36."

Style note: when "by" agents help vs hurt

You can include the actor with "by" — but only when it adds information.

Useful: "The vulnerability was disclosed by an external researcher in March." (the source matters)

Wasteful: "The migration was run by us last night." — switch to active: "We ran the migration last night."

"Get-passive": informal alternative

"Get + past participle" is a more conversational passive form. Common in spoken and casual written English.

Formal: "The proposal was rejected." → Casual: "The proposal got rejected."

Formal: "The system is being reviewed." → Casual: "The system is getting reviewed." "Get-passive" implies the subject was acted upon, often unexpectedly.

Common passive-voice mistakes

Wrong past participle: "The report was wrote" → "The report was written." Use the past participle (written), not simple past (wrote).
Missing "be": "The bug fixed" → "The bug was fixed." Passive always needs a form of "be."
Tense mismatch: "The data is collected last week" → "The data was collected last week." Time marker ("last week") forces past tense.
Overuse hiding agency: "Mistakes were made" when you mean "we made mistakes." Active is more honest.
Stranded prepositions: "The proposal was talked" → "The proposal was talked about." Phrasal verbs keep their prepositions in the passive.

Practice: Test yourself

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