Academic English revision

Your Education Essay Doesn’t Have a Passive Voice Problem. It Has a Verb Problem

Passive voice isn’t the enemy. It’s a cover for lazy verbs and unclear agency. Your education essay needs actors, not just actions.

Your supervisor said your education essay reads like a lab report from 2014. You panicked, hunted down every passive construction, and rewrote them all into active voice. Submitted it. Same reaction: “It still feels unnatural.” You were fixing the symptom, not the disease. The problem was never passive voice. It’s that you’re terrified of committing to a specific verb, so you default to safe, vague ones—show, indicate, demonstrate—and then wrap them in passive structures to hide the fact that they’re doing no real work. You didn’t have a grammar problem. You had a courage problem with your vocabulary.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you in first-year writing seminars: passive voice is not inherently wrong. It’s a tool. The problem starts when you use it as a crutch because your active verb is too weak to stand alone. ❌ It was observed that students’ engagement levels decreased over the semester. ✅ Teacher absence from remote sessions lowered student engagement sharply. The second sentence has an actor (teacher), a specific verb (lowered), and a clear cause. The first sentence has a ghost doing the observing, and “decreased” tells you nothing about why or how. You don’t need to ban passive voice. You need verbs strong enough that the passive feels unnecessary.

❌ The curriculum was designed to support diverse learners. ✅ This sentence is technically fine, but “designed” is bureaucratic filler. What did the design actually do? ✅ The curriculum built entry points for diverse learners to access core content. “Built” is concrete, directional, and commits the author to a claim about what the curriculum accomplished. Notice: I didn’t swap in a ten-dollar word. I swapped in an accurate one. That’s the whole game. You don’t need “elucidate” where “clarify” does the job, and you definitely don’t need “it was shown that” where a named actor can just do the showing.

Now, let’s talk about where passive voice actually earns its keep in education writing. When the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately depersonalized to emphasize the phenomenon: ✅ Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Fine. The who doesn’t matter; the method does. But ❌ Decisions were made to restrict school autonomy is a cop-out. Who decided? The reader wants to know because accountability is the whole point of your argument. ✅ District administrators restricted school autonomy via new funding mandates. Stop using passive voice as an excuse to avoid taking a position in your own research.

The litmus test I use—and should probably tattoo on my wrist: If converting to active voice makes the sentence clearer about who is doing what, you were hiding. If it creates redundancy or awkward emphasis, keep the passive and fix your verb instead. This is where easydue earns its spot in my workflow: I dump a draft section in, and it flags the spots where passive structures are masking weak verbs or unclear agency. I don’t let it rewrite for me, but the highlights force me to ask “who actually did this?” every single time. Ten minutes of wrestling with that question per draft beats an hour of polishing grammar.

One more pattern you’re definitely using and not noticing: ❌ It is generally believed that teacher professional development improves practice. “It is generally believed” is the academic version of “vibes say.” Who believes it? Cite the research, name the consensus, or delete the phrase and state your claim directly. ✅ Recent RCTs indicate that structured PD programs drive measurable shifts in classroom instruction. Now the reader knows you’re claiming something specific, backed by a specific evidence type, and they can evaluate it. Your education essay isn’t about sounding safe. It’s about making your argument visible. Every verb you hide behind passive voice is a position you refuse to take—and your supervisor can smell hesitation from page one.