Mike Robbins shares some guidance:
Passive voice hides the actor, making instructions vague or more difficult to follow. Instead, use active voice to clarify who performs the action. Active voice includes any sentence where the subject performs the action (e.g., You run the script).
- Incorrect: When the font size is adjusted, the code becomes easier to read.
- Correct: If you adjust the font size, your code becomes easier to read.
Active voice makes instructions direct and actionable.
I hate passive voice enough that I would link to this post even if it were the only piece of advice on there. There are very specific good uses for passive voice in English, particularly when you do not know who the actor was and the actor does not matter. The rest of the time, people primarily use passive voice when they want to weasel out of something or avoid assigning blame. And most of the time, even when you think this you have a good use case for passive voice, you probably don’t.
Case in point: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was a primary inciting factor for the Great War.” This is passive voice—we swapped a verb (assassinate) to a noun (assassination) in order to focus on the direct object at the expense of the subject. The general rule of thumb is that if you can ask “By whom?” when reading a sentence, there is a very good chance that the author used passive voice. And we may think at first that the actor does not matter, but I chose this example precisely because he does. In order to understand why the Austro-Hungarian government reacted the way it did, you have to know that the assassin was a Serbian nationalist, that the Russian government had a particularly close connection with Serbia, and that the Austro-Hungarian government had a very contentious relationship with the Balkans at that point (and I’m being kind by using the word “contentious” here). Granted, it’s not critical to fit all of this into the one sentence, but removing the subject turns into a game of “hide the ball” way too quickly.
In active tense, I’d rewrite the sentence to be something like: “A primary inciting factor for the Great War occurred when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
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