Tip 2: How to accurately use active and passive voice

This week’s topic is how to teach your students to correctly use active and passive voice in their papers.

Instructors, do you read papers where your students jump back and forth between the active voice and the passive voice? While this could lead to choppy communication between the writer and reader, in APA Style, it isn’t unacceptable for your students to use both active and passive voice in their writing.

Nevertheless, you want your students to learn to be consistent in their writing, and to know when to use both voices based on the context of their work. To assist with this aim, assign your students the Let’s Get Active: Active Voice Writing Guide (PDF, 108KB)opens in new window as an in-class activity (or as a homework assignment) before you introduce their next major writing task.

This guide, which is based on Section 4.13 in the Publication Manual and Section 2.13 in the Concise Guide to APA Style, will help your students determine whether it is more important to highlight those performing the actions (i.e., active voice) or those receiving the actions (i.e., passive voice) in their writing.

You can repeat this activity as many times as you like by replacing the sentences used in the handout with real-life examples from your students’ papers. Students learn better when they have a personal connection to a topic or an issue.

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