‘Use the active voice whenever possible’: The Impact of Style Guidelines in Medical Journals

Medical writing is sometimes criticized for excessive use of the passive voice. The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to provide quantitative descriptions of how the passive voice is used in medical journals and (ii) to assess the impact of style guidelines encouraging use of the active voice. From a corpus of 297 primary research articles published in the top five medical journals, we extracted 19,691 passive constructions. Analyses show...