Quick answer: skip the passive voice in technical English. It's harder to interpret for non-native readers, and in engineering, a misread instruction isn't just an awkward sentence. It's a safety risk.

You probably learned the opposite at school. "The passive voice sounds more professional," your teacher said. "It's more objective." That advice is outdated. In modern technical English, passive voice usually makes your writing harder to follow, not more credible.

Think about the difference between "The valve should be closed before inspection" and "Close the valve before inspection." Same instruction. But the passive version leaves it unclear who closes the valve, and when, inside a longer procedure. A native speaker usually fills that gap from context without noticing. A non-native reader working through an unfamiliar sentence structure gets an extra layer of processing, exactly where missed steps happen.

That's the real argument: passive voice adds a layer of interpretation the reader has to do. Active voice removes it. On a job site or in a maintenance manual, that's not a style preference. It's the difference between a clear instruction and a misunderstood one.

Here's why active voice wins in technical writing, when passive voice still earns its place, and how Simplified Technical English settled this argument for good.

What Is the Passive Voice, Really?

Passive voice: the subject receives the action instead of doing it. "The bracket was installed." We know it happened. We don't know who did it.

Active voice: the subject does the action. "The technician installed the bracket." Same fact, but now the sentence names who's responsible.

Both are grammatically correct. English allows both. The question technical English asks isn't "is this grammatical," it's "does this leave room for misreading?"

That's the test we'll come back to for the rest of this article.

The Real Problem With the Passive Voice in Technical Writing

Active voice follows a predictable order: actor, action, object (aka subject-verb-object). Passive voice reverses that order and often drops the actor altogether. A native speaker fills in the gaps automatically. A B2 reader working in their second, third, or fourth language has to do that reconstruction consciously, every time. Over a long procedure, that adds up fast. There's a real risk of misunderstanding. Imagine a misunderstanding in an aviation manual. Let that sink in. Or picture a load calculation report that says "this was reviewed" with no reviewer named. If it turns out nobody actually reviewed it, that's not a grammar problem anymore. That's a liability problem.

There's a second failure mode, specific to technical writing: broken cause-and-effect. A procedure is a chain of steps. This happens, which triggers that, which requires the next action. Passive voice can quietly break that chain. "The signal is received, and the alarm is triggered" reads fine until you ask: triggered by what, exactly? The signal itself? Something downstream? Read at normal speed, it's easy to assume a link that was never actually stated. In a process document, that's exactly where things go wrong.

Passive voice also just sounds dated. Workplace English in general has gotten less formal since the nineties, technical writing included. A sentence like "the drawings were submitted for approval" doesn't read as appropriately professional anymore. It reads like it's stuck in a decade that also gave us fax cover sheets.

So why does it stick around? Spoken English is full of it, and nobody notices it there. "The coffee machine got fixed this morning." Nobody in the kitchen cares who fixed it, and that's fine, spoken English works differently. The habit just doesn't know when to stop, and it follows people straight into their reports.

Ask yourself, every time you write a passive sentence: do I actually not know who's responsible here? If you do know, write it that way.

How Simplified Technical English Made This Official

ASD-STE100, known as Simplified Technical English (STE), is the clearest evidence that this isn't a style preference. It's a standard.

STE was built in the 1980s by the European aerospace industry, specifically because maintenance crews around the world weren't always native English speakers, and a misread instruction on an aircraft can kill people. That's not a hypothetical this article invented for effect. It's the actual reason the standard exists.

The current edition (Issue 9, 2025) runs to 53 writing rules and a controlled dictionary of roughly 900 words. One of those rules: active voice for procedures and instructions. Passive voice is allowed only in descriptive text, and only when the actor is genuinely unknown or irrelevant.

That's the exact distinction this article has been making. STE didn't invent the rule. It made it mandatory, because in aviation maintenance, "probably fine" isn't good enough.

STE has since spread well beyond aerospace, into rail, medical devices, and industrial documentation generally. For the full picture of what Technical English covers and where standards like STE fit in, see here.

Where the Passive Voice Still Has a Place

Even STE states that the passive voice isn't always wrong. It allows it in descriptive text, when the actor is genuinely unknown or irrelevant.

Both conditions come up in real engineering writing.

Unknown actor: "The crack was first reported in 2019." Nobody kept a record of who noticed it first. There's no name to put there, so passive voice isn't a workaround here, it's the honest option.

Irrelevant actor: "The bridge was completed in 1998." In a maintenance history or a background paragraph, nobody needs to know which contractor poured the concrete. The date is what matters, not the crew.

The dividing line isn't grammar. It's whether the actor is something the reader actually needs. In an instruction, they almost always do, which is exactly why STE requires active voice there. In background or descriptive text, they often don't.

So the rule from this article isn't "never use passive voice." It's narrower: in a procedure, an instruction, a report section where responsibility matters, name who's doing what. Everywhere else, use your judgement.

FAQ

If passive voice keeps creeping into your reports, it's rarely a grammar problem. It's usually a habit picked up from formal writing that was never actually the standard, just familiar.

That's the kind of thing a second pair of eyes catches fast. If you want to know exactly where your writing loses clarity, and what to fix first, book a free 15-minute call. We'll look at a real example from your work, not a textbook one.

References:

University of Toronto Writing Advice: Passive Voice — When to Use It and When to Avoid It

Original Post from 2022; latest update: 10 August 2026.