Passive voice transfer

In many academic traditions — Russian, German, Japanese, and formal Spanish among them — passive and impersonal constructions signal objectivity and scholarly register. Writers trained in those traditions carry that habit into English, where the norm in most fields now runs the other way: journals and style guides increasingly ask for active voice and visible agents.

The transfer produces sentences that are grammatical but heavier than English expects:

• Transferred: "It was decided by the committee that the experiment would be repeated."
• Revised: "The committee decided to repeat the experiment."

The key contrast is passive by habit versus passive by choice. English still uses the passive deliberately — when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, or when the object deserves the subject position ("The samples were stored at −80 °C"). The problem is defaulting to it because your first academic language treats active voice as informal. In English, the default costs you words, hides who did what, and can make methods sections harder to follow.

Why it matters for ESL writers: this is one of the most common patterns grammar tools flag, and because each flagged sentence is technically correct, the feedback feels arbitrary. Understanding it as register transfer — not error — makes the revision decision easier: keep the passive where it earns its place, convert it where it doesn't.

For AI detection, the relevance is indirect but real: uniformly formal, agentless prose has a flat sentence rhythm, and low variation between sentences is one of the signals detectors read. Mixing active and deliberate passive restores the variation natural human writing tends to have.