If you are like most people, you were probably taught in your high school English classes that it is not okay to use the passive voice when writing.

The passive voice is that in which the subject of a sentence receives an action, while in the active voice, the subject performs the action.

An example of the difference between the active and passive voice:

Fred threw a snowball. (active voice)

A snowball was thrown by Fred. (passive voice)

The active voice is usually favored in writing because it is often more concise and requires fewer words. Consider the following example:

I want freedom. (active voice)

Freedom is wanted by me. (passive voice)

You probably wouldn’t shout “Freedom is wanted by me!” at a rally.

So why would anyone write in the passive voice?

In scientific articles, that is how it’s done.

When reporting scientific results, an author wants to distance the work from the people who performed the work. This is professionalism in the scientific world. The author emphasizes the reactants, products, results, and ideas, not their staff who mixed up reagents, cared for lab mice, created line and bar graphs, and typed up the results.

Consider the following paragraph, which is written in the active voice:

“Jamie centrifuged the suspension at 10,000 x g and aspirated the supernatant. Then she resuspended the pellet in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4. Following this, she spread the suspension on an agar plate and put the plate in a 37°C incubator for 16 hours.”

Doesn’t this sound like I am telling a story or writing a novel? It seems like I am writing about Jamie’s life in the lab, not a scientific paper.

Now consider the same paragraph written in the passive voice:

“The suspension was centrifuged at 10,000 x g and the supernatant was aspirated. The pellet was resuspended in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4 and the suspension was spread on an agar plate and incubated at 37°C for 16 hours.”

We don’t know who did this work…and scientists don’t care if it was Jamie or Jessie or Jenny who did. We do know the actions that were performed, and that’s what we are concerned with. Also, in this case, the paragraph written in the passive voice is more concise, which is important in scientific writing.

If you are a scientific editor, do you prefer the passive or active voice?

I specialize in research manuscripts, which I edit in MS Word. However, once a year, I perform a very different kind of editing.

I edit sales catalogs for a teak furniture company for which a friend of mine works.

You might think I edit all the text in the catalog in a Word document, but that is not the case at all. There are many things that are very different when editing one of this company’s catalogs.

The editing is done on PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. In order to do this, I peruse each page and place a comment icon wherever I see an error or other issue. When I do this, a comment list pops up in a narrow pane on the right side of the screen, and my comment appears there while I am writing it. When I have finished, I click the save icon. (I save the PDF after every comment I make, because I am very paranoid about losing my work.)

My editing these catalogs consist of editing the text, verifying the SKU number and dimensions of each furniture item, and verifying each item’s price. This means that I must have the PDF, the company’s website, and an Excel pricing spreadsheet open on my PC and constantly click back and forth between the three of them. This can get very confusing and can test my attention span, but I have become skilled at doing this. After all, I have been editing this company’s sales catalogs since its 2020 edition.

Distraction is my biggest challenge when editing the catalogs. The large photos of the products are absolutely gorgeous—chaises by a swimming pool of aqua-blue water, friendly-looking Adirondack chairs placed in a circle around a fire pit in a beautiful backyard—you can imagine. I sometimes find myself admiring the scenery and thinking, “If I win the lottery, that will be my swimming pool,” or “I would absolutely love for that to be my patio.” Then I quickly smack myself in the figurative face and think, “Okay, we have editing to do.”

Editors, do you do any work in Acrobat? If so, what do you edit?