Should avoid the passive voice in an undergraduate history thesis?
I am a history professor, and I strongly advise students to avoid the passive voice. See William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1918), scroll down to section 11.
The passive voice doesn’t put up “mental hurdles.” Unless you’re a bad writer — and even then, the mental hurdles come from the bad writing, not the passive voice. Sometimes the passive voice is the most elegant way to express a thought. But, I am not a Prescriptivist. Your thesis advisor may be. Find out about his or her writing peeves (everyone has their own collection of them) and make them your own, if only temporarily.
You don’t need to contort a sentence to avoid the passive voice. You need to rewrite the sentence so that it’s active. Passive-voice writing suggests that the writer hasn’t thought deeply about his subject. He doesn’t know WHO is doing WHAT to WHOM. History tells a great, long story, full of action. You should be able to write about it actively. And I don’t see what “I” has to do with it. Many writers use third-person narration and have no trouble avoiding the passive voice. Hopefully, we write (whether we’re academics or graffiti artists) to communicate. We should excise anything from our prose that hinders communication. We should promote anything that furthers communication. Passive writing damages communication, because our minds can’t grasp onto an image of a motivating force.
I personally wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid it, but my academic writing is pretty flip and conversational. I used to get little comments like “Decorum, sir!” in the margins of my papers. You can use the passive voice to excellent rhetorical effect. “Mistakes were made” is a brilliant sentence. However, a paper with too much passive voice is obscurantist and difficult to read, so I think the taboo is mainly in place to encourage bad writers to shake their habits. If you’re a good writer, just be aware of what you’re saying and conscious of how your paper reads, and let stylistic norms fall out the window.
Yeah, especially in an academic piece of writing, active voice is good because it communicates responsibility and makes you avoid vagueness. A sentence that would initially read, “It is often asserted that x and y and z,” now has to read “Mr. A, Ms. B. and Mrs. C have asserted that x and y and z.” In general it pushes you into a more aggressive and forceful posture. It highlights nouns instead of verbs. I don’t think it’s a ‘peeve’ in the sense that it doesn’t matter; it does matter very much, in that it completely changes the tone of your writing. My rule of thumb is only to use the passive voice when I explicitly want to communicate a passive action, e.g., “He was hit by the baseball.” So, if it helps, think (actively) about whether a sentence should be passive whenever you find yourself writing a passive sentence. Most of the time you’ll want to push for a more active sense in the sentence.
