Three reasons to prefer active to passive

Our brain process active sentences more efficiently for three reasons.

1. Readers' brain process active constructions faster

Why? Cause and effect power human perception. Readers process sentences with causal relationships faster than other kinds of sentences. Causal order involves active construction, which reproduces the chronological order of events. If I say I lobbed the cookies at his head, the sentence preserves the order of events in which I chucked a batch of chocolate chip cookies at my victim's head. But if I say The cookies were lobbed at his head by me the result of the tossing precedes me, the actor who actually tossed those lumps of baked dough. Moreover, readers implicitly expect the order of items in sentences to replicate the order in which events unfolded. If this order is inverted, readers have to reassemble the sentence to undertand who did what. That is why the readers' brains take longer to process passive construction.

2. Readers tend to misinterpret a sentence in passive

Readers misinterpret implausible sentences one-quarter of the time when sentences rely on passive construction, such as The dog was bitten by the man. Readers commit this error presumably not because they could visualize a scenario in which a neighbor assaulted, say, a corgi minding its own business, but because the passive construction obscured agency. Otherwise, readers make this error because they required substantially more time to make sense of the passive, implausible sentence than either the active, implausible sentences or the passive, plausible sentences.

3. Active constructions use the default sentence order

Active construction builds on the default order of sentences in English – subject-verb-object. In fact, in nearly every language in the world, subjects normally precede objects and nearly always come before verbs. This order more closely replicates the way we perceive events in the world. First, we encounter the actor, then the action, then the result. Just like life – at least most of the time.

Adapted from "The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer" by Y. Douglas.