Passive Voice and Nominalisation in Technical English
5 exercises — deciding when to use passive voice ('The deployment was completed'), nominalisation ('Deployment completion'), or active voice ('The team completed the deployment') in technical documentation.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
An incident report states: "The deployment was completed at 14:32 UTC." A technical editor suggests converting this to a nominalised form. Which is correct?
Option A is correct.Nominalisation converts a verb phrase into a noun phrase: "was completed" → "Deployment completion." This is appropriate in formal incident timelines and status reports where concise noun-heavy language is expected. The nominalised form "Deployment completion occurred at 14:32 UTC" is compact and suitable for timeline tables. Option B ("got completed") is informal — avoid "get passives" in technical documentation. Option C is active voice — accurate but the sentence loses the impersonal, event-focused tone of incident reporting. Option D is a fragment.
2 / 5
An architecture document compares two phrasings: (A) "The validation of user input is performed by the middleware layer." (B) "The middleware layer validates user input." Which is preferable, and why?
Option B is correct. When the agent is known and the sentence describes a straightforward action, active voice is clearer and more concise. "The middleware layer validates user input" (13 words reduced from 13 words, but the structure is direct and unambiguous). Passive + nominalisation ("The validation…is performed by…") adds syntactic complexity without adding information — it buries the agent in a "by" phrase. Passive and nominalised forms are appropriate when the agent is unknown, unimportant, or when noun-heavy language is required (e.g., section headings, status reports). Here the agent is explicit and relevant.
3 / 5
A release note states: "_____ of the authentication token _____ now _____ automatically on each API call." Which nominalised form completes the sentence correctly?
Option D is correct."Token refresh" is a compound noun nominalisation — the most natural and concise form for technical release notes. It avoids the awkward "refreshing of" (gerund-of construction is clunky) and the verbose "the refresh of the authentication token." In technical documentation, compound noun nominalisations (token refresh, deployment completion, cache invalidation, request validation) are preferred over gerund-of ("validating of") or noun-of ("the validation of") constructions. Option C is grammatically correct but verbose. Options A and B are grammatically awkward.
4 / 5
A requirements specification contains the sentence: "It is required that the system performs automatic log rotation." Which version uses passive nominalisation most appropriately for a formal requirement?
Option C is correct. In formal requirements specifications, passive + nominalisation is appropriate when the agent (the system) is implied by context and does not need to be stated. "Automatic log rotation is required" is concise, impersonal, and in line with RFC-style requirement language. Option A (active) is clear but the informal "must perform" is better in capability statements than feature requirements. Option B is correct but verbose. Option D is overly nominalised — "log rotation performance" is grammatically awkward. Use passive nominalisation in requirements to foreground the feature, not the agent.
5 / 5
Which sentence demonstrates the correct use of passive voice in technical documentation when the agent is unknown?
Option B is correct. The passive voice ("was modified") is the appropriate choice in technical and security documentation when the agent (who modified the file) is unknown or deliberately omitted. It keeps the focus on the affected object (the configuration file) and the significant detail (without authorisation). Option A ("someone modified") explicitly names an unknown agent — awkward in formal technical writing. Option C (nominalisation: "Modification…happened") is grammatically correct but the addition of "happened" makes it wordy; full nominalisation would be "Unauthorised modification of the configuration file was detected." Option D ("got modified") is informal — avoid "get passives" in security incident reports.