In academic writing, passive voice is used to explain a process, the findings of a study, or other objective content. The active voice, on the other hand, is used to describe actions. Use of the passive voice can be useful when you want to show that something is happening because of other things, without naming those other things. In academic writing, the passive voice is often used to avoid attributing responsibility for events or circumstances. For example, if someone breaks into your home and steals some of your property, then writes "a fire broke out" on the wall with his fingerprints, it would be acceptable to write about this event in the past tense by using the passive voice: "the fire broke out." This means that nobody is responsible for starting the fire; it just happened somehow before they arrived on the scene. Another reason for using the passive voice in academic writing is if you do not want to mention certain people or entities. For example, if you are studying fires at homes in California and you know that most of them are caused by cooking or smoking cigarettes, you could say that "a fire service reports that cooking is the most common cause of home fires," rather than mentioning specific individuals or organizations who work with firefighters.