When Passive Voice Is Correct in the Methods Section
Most advice says cut every passive sentence from a methods section. In practice, most of a methods section is exactly where passive voice belongs. Here is the test that tells the two apart, the same procedure written both ways, and what APA's own guidance actually recommends.
A supervisor returns a methods section, every passive sentence circled, with a note: make this active. The student spends an evening rewriting "Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions" as "We randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions," repeats the swap across twenty more sentences, and turns in a methods section that now reads worse than the one that got circled.
That supervisor is repeating a rule that's only half right. Should the methods section be written in passive voice? Sometimes: passive voice is correct wherever the person performing an action is irrelevant, obvious, or beside the point, which describes a big share of a methods section. Active voice is correct wherever a choice was made and somebody has to own it. Most advice telling writers to strip out every passive sentence skips that distinction completely, including a fair amount of it that's chasing a lower AI-detection score rather than a clearer sentence.
Some of that pressure comes from AI detectors, which flag a methods section more than almost any other part of a paper, precisely because passive voice and fixed procedural language are the convention there. TextPulse's own guide to using an AI humanizer for academic writing section by section makes that same point from the detection side: a high score in methods is ordinary and is not, on its own, evidence of anything. This piece stays on an older, narrower question that has nothing to do with any detector: which sentences in a methods section should actually be passive, on grammatical grounds, and which read better active.
Should the Methods Section Be Written in Passive Voice?
Most a methods section needs to remain in the passive voice because most a methods section describes a process done to materials or participants, and the person doing it isn't the interesting bit of the sentence. A smaller, specific set of sentences should switch to the active voice: the ones describing choices, which really could've gone either way, where it matters who did what. Hiding the person who did it will cost the reader something.
Two questions settle most individual sentences. First, does naming who performed the action add anything a reader needs? If a specific research assistant, kit, or piece of equipment does not matter to repeating the step, passive voice is doing its job by leaving that detail out. Second, was this a decision among real alternatives, the kind a reviewer might reasonably ask you to justify? If so, naming the person who made it, almost always "I" or "we," is what active voice is for.
When Passive Voice Is the Right Choice
Most of a methods section reports a fixed sequence of steps applied to a sample, an instrument, or a set of materials, and the agent performing each step is genuinely beside the point. "Blood samples were centrifuged at 3,000 rpm for ten minutes" does not need "a lab technician centrifuged the blood samples" to be repeatable; the parameters are what another researcher needs, not the identity of whoever pressed the button.
Passive voice also keeps a paragraph's subject stable, which matters more than most style advice admits. Once a paragraph has established participants as its subject, "participants completed a battery of three questionnaires" keeps the reader's attention where the previous sentence left it. Switching to "we administered a battery of three questionnaires" drags the subject back to the researcher in every sentence, which is its own kind of clutter across a full paragraph.
When Active Voice Is the Right Choice
Active voice earns its place wherever a sentence reports a decision rather than a step. "Outliers more than three standard deviations from the mean were excluded" is grammatical and common, but it presents a judgment call, what counts as an outlier and whether to drop one, as though it happened on its own. "We excluded outliers more than three standard deviations from the mean" keeps that decision visible and attributable, which is exactly what a reviewer checking your analytic choices wants to see.
That "we" is doing real work, and it touches a separate question a lot of writers carry into a methods section without examining it: whether academic writing permits the word "I" at all. It does, more directly than most writers expect, and TextPulse's piece on whether you can use I in an APA paper covers that question on its own terms. Here, the point is narrower: once a sentence reports something you decided rather than something you did to a sample, naming yourself as the one who decided it is usually the clearer choice.
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The Same Procedure, Written Both Ways
Here is one methods paragraph, sentence by sentence, written passive and then active, so the difference is visible instead of asserted.
| Passive version | Active version | Which reads better, and why |
|---|---|---|
| Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. | We randomly assigned participants to one of three conditions. | Close to even. Passive keeps "participants" as the subject the paragraph has already built around; active is slightly more direct. Either holds up. |
| Blood samples were centrifuged at 3,000 rpm for ten minutes. | A laboratory technician centrifuged the blood samples at 3,000 rpm for ten minutes. | Passive wins. Who ran the centrifuge is irrelevant; the speed and duration are what a reader needs to repeat the step. |
| Outliers more than three standard deviations from the mean were excluded from the analysis. | We excluded outliers more than three standard deviations from the mean. | Active is the better choice. Exclusion is a judgment call, and naming who made it keeps that choice visible rather than automatic sounding. |
| A semi-structured interview protocol was used, adapted from prior work. | We adapted Okafor and Lin's (2021) semi-structured interview protocol, modifying three questions for a clinical population. | Active wins clearly. The modification is a specific, ownable decision that passive voice would blur into the background. |
Every active sentence in that table would still parse as grammatical passive, and every passive one would still parse as grammatical active. What actually differs between the two columns is which version tells the reader what matters most in that sentence, the procedure or the person choosing it, and that has nothing to do with grammatical correctness. Running a full draft through a passive voice checker finds every passive sentence in it, and a passive to active converter can flip the ones that need it, but neither tool can tell you which ones are correct. Only the two questions above can do that.
What APA Style Actually Says About Active and Passive Voice
Most writers assume the reverse, given how methods sections actually read, but APA Style's own guidance leads with active voice as the default. Its instruction is direct: "Use the active voice as much as possible to create direct, clear, and concise sentences, especially when you are writing about the actions of people." Passive voice remains permitted. APA frames it as the exception rather than the house style.
The exception APA names is almost a description of a methods section by itself: "Use the passive voice when it is more important to focus on the recipient of an action than on who performed the action, such as when describing an experimental setup." That one example, an experimental setup, is why a methods section built from APA's own general preference for active voice still ends up mostly passive in practice: describing a setup is most of what the section is doing.
Why Journal House Style Has the Final Word
None of this operates above a specific journal's instructions to authors. A journal that has run passive methods sections for forty years often keeps that convention in writing, regardless of what APA or any general style guide recommends by default. Check the target journal's own guidance before rewriting a methods section on the strength of a general rule, including this one. Getting individual sentences right from here is a grammar decision. A whole draft that needs more than that is a different job, and TextPulse's AI humanizer works across full sections at once rather than one sentence at a time.
Tense is the question that travels with this one, and verb tenses across a research paper are set out section by section. The discussion section, where both choices shift again, has its own page.
The more useful habit is reading each sentence on its own and asking what it is actually reporting, a step that happened to a sample or a decision that somebody made, then letting that answer choose the voice, one sentence at a time, rather than picking one voice for the whole section in advance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should the methods section be written in passive voice? Most of it, but not automatically. Passive voice is correct wherever the person performing a step is irrelevant or obvious, which covers most of a methods section. Active voice is correct wherever a sentence reports a real choice, such as an exclusion criterion or a chosen threshold, and someone needs to be named as having made it.
Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
