Sometime in the near future, we will be releasing a booklet that explains our conventions and house style in great detail. This will be helpful for our authors to understand exactly how to best put their work together for publication. Up until the release, we will, from time to time, be posting small previews on the blog.

---

Passive Voice

Lammi Publishing prefers that authors, in most circumstances, use active, rather than passive voice. That is, you say, “The platoon captured the village,” not “the village was captured by the platoon.” There are exceptions to this, such as when you seek to emphasize the receiver, rather than the doer of the action, like “the corporal has been shot,” if the doer of the action doesn’t matter within context. These situations, however, tend to be few and far between. Some scholars do believe that passive voice lends itself to impartiality, but that is generally specific to the sciences, where the researchers want to remove themselves from the equation by saying things like “the solution was set at 33 ppm.” In humanities writing, active voice works much more effectively to engage an audience. We certainly expect academic professionalism from our authors, but at the end of the day, we are telling stories, and we are selling those stories to audience members who are far more likely to keep reading if they can absorb themselves into the tale.