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Verb use in science writing: active, passive, or imperative?

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2026. Verb use in science writing: active, passive, or imperative? https://worldts.com/english-writing/517/index.html

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you may have found yourself wondering about advice on whether to use active and passive voice, or (rarely) the imperative “grammatical mood”. First, a few definitions to ensure that you and I are thinking about the same thing:

Active voice involves a specific actor (the person who acts) performing some action. For example, you are reading this article that I wrote. “Reading” is the present tense, and “wrote” is the past tense, but in both cases, the voice is active because you and I both are playing an actor’s role: we are doing or have already done something.
Passive voice involves some action being done by someone, and that person may not be identified (i.e., may be left implicit). For example, this article was read after having been written. Both verbs are in the past tense, but that’s not what defines them as passive: the symptom is the lack of an explicit actor: without writing “read by you” and “written by me”, the actor is unclear.
Imperative is used to give commands. For example, when you finish reading this article, send a copy to your friends. “Send” is the command that makes this sentence imperative. Software user manuals and other technical documentation often use imperative.

An increasing number of authorities, including many journal editors, recommend using active voice because it is often clearer than passive voice, because it clearly identifies the actor and is often shorter (which can reduce the cost of the page charges most journals ask you to pay before they will publish your work). It’s not that passive voice is always longer; rather, it seems to encourage longer and more convoluted wording.

Passive voice is commonly used in the Methods section of a paper, since the person or persons who performed the action (the authors) is always clear and the important point is the action, not the actor. Older writing advice also noted that passive is better because scientists should be seen as objective actors who are separate from the action. There is some logic to this, since using “I” or “we” shifts the focus away from the action. It's hard to see why this is inappropriate, since the really important point is whether the writing is clear and concise.

Interestingly, even though imperative mood has proven to be clear and effective in technical writing (e.g., creating software user manuals), it is almost never used in science writing. This is probably more due to tradition than logic, as expressing laboratory methods like the instructions in a cookbook makes a lot of sense.

Here’s what a typical part of the Methods section might look like in the three types of verb form:

Passive voice: The acid was added to the base until the base was neutralized.
Active voice: We added the acid to the base until we neutralized the base.
Imperative: Mix the acid with the base. Continue adding acid until the base is neutralized.

All three explanations are clear and effective. But I’d like to see more use of the imperative for describing methods, as my experience as a technical writer suggests that it would be easier to use when performing an experiment: imperative is naturally well suited to describing a series of steps. In particular, it focuses on the procedure rather than the experimenter (the main argument in favor of passive voice), it is potentially more concise (one argument in favor of active voice), and naturally follows the way we act when we follow the steps of a procedure.

It would be interesting to test my suggestion by creating common procedures as a series of imperative statements. Since journal editors and reviewers tend to be quite conservative, and reluctant to change, it might be difficult to persuade them to allow such steps in the Methods section. But it might be possible to test the use of imperative instructions in the Supplemental Methods. Those descriptions are the kind of thing one might print or display on a tablet computer so that the instructions could be placed beside the tools of an experiment to facilitate their use in the correct order—exactly the way we place a cookbook recipe on the counter as we follow the instructions for adding ingredients.