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- Active or passive
- Use the passive voice to focus on the action
- Favour the passive voice in the Methods and Results sections
- Use the verb form to organize the sentence content
- Use verb forms that keep characters in subject position
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- Use the active with the pronouns I or we
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If you favour the active voice in the Methods and Results sections, you will focus on the researchers. By using the passive you can change the focus to the materials and procedures used or the results obtained, and also avoid a long list of sentences all beginning with the pronouns I or We. What is more, in this central section of the research paper, readers know who is responsible for the actions. There is no need to specify the agent of every action because it is obvious.
 | We obtained intelligibility quotients by presenting 273 undergraduates in their final year with abstracts from five research articles. We presented the control group with the original texts, and the two experimental groups with texts containing a high prevalence of verbs in either the passive or the active voice. We determined the intelligibility of the three text types by dividing the time taken to read the texts by the number of correct answers given to a series of post-reading questions. We assessed the differences in intelligibility between the three texts with a dependent t test. |
 | Intelligibility quotients were obtained by presenting 273 undergraduates in their final year with abstracts from five research articles. The control group was presented with the original texts, and the two experimental groups were presented with texts containing a high prevalence of verbs in either the passive or the active voice. The intelligibility of the three text types was determined by dividing the time taken to read the texts by the number of correct answers given to a series of post-reading questions. Differences in intelligibility between the three texts were assessed with a dependent t test. |
Recommended citation:
«Favour the passive voice in the Methods and Results sections» [en línia]. A: Llibre d’estil de la Universitat de Barcelona. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Serveis Lingüístics. <https://www.ub.edu/llibre-estil/criteri.php?id=3451> [consulta: 26 abril 2024].