Most writing courses frown upon the over-use of passive voice, but it’s the norm in technical writing. Should I just give in to the trend and use passive voice everywhere, or is it OK to use first person pronouns instead? If so, is it arrogant to use “I” instead of “we”? Example:
“I used a T-2300 spectroscope to measure…”
“We used a T-2300 spectroscope to measure…”
“A T-2300 spectroscope was used to measure…”
My current work is especially tricky since it’s a group effort, but it’s a thesis so there are no listed co-authors. I would just use passive voice but I’m not very comfortable using them everywhere, it just seems like bad writing.
I used to be a book editor at an educational think tank. In the context you give, the passive voice is the best choice. That is very technical technical writing, and the less “I” or “we” show up, the better.
When you’re the only author of a paper, it’s usually not acceptable to use “we” unless the names of the other people are mentioned at the beginning of the paper as having taken part in the experiment/procedure. In this case, you’d be the only author listed, but it would be clear others were involved. It’s just that if you use “we” you need to make it clear who else is involved, else the reader may wonder if you’re a schizophrenic.
When you’re the only author and also the only person who performed the experiment, “I” must be used if the active voice is employed: “I used the T-2300 spectroscope …”
Passive voice is not a problem in our technical articles, as long as there are no dangling modifiers, as in “Using a T-2300 spectroscope, the intensity was measured.” (What is doing the using?)
When an experiment is being described in a step-by-step process, the active voice is preferred most of the time; it’s not really a big deal unless the author switches from voice to voice within the passage.
Here’s another vote for passive. When I wrote up my thesis (I know exactly what you mean by tricky) I went to great pains to keep everything in the passive and not use ‘we.’
The passive voice is the norm in technical writing. After all, no one is interested in the authors–they’re interested in what happened in the experiment. Only use pronouns when the people referred to by the pronouns are the subjects of interest.
It’s a good practice to make the grammatical subjects of your sentences match up with what the sentence is about. If this requires you to use the passive voice, then use the passive voice.
ultrafilter - that’s basically what I was getting at when asking why one would use the active. With the passive, the emphasis is on the result or object, which seems to be what one would want in such a paper. Journalism and creative writing have different rules and reasons for avoiding the passive, but the active just sounds silly to me in an academic paper of this sort.
This is not a grammatically correct sentence, since “making” is behaving as a verb, not as a gerund, and therefore can’t be the subject. You’re better off changing it to “A good grammatical practice is to make the grammatical subject of a sentence match up with the actual subject of a sentence.”
One will use the the active voice when one is listing the steps needed for a particular experiment. One does not always use the active voice in a paper, however, because doing so can often seem awkward and disjointed. When we are editing technical papers here, we will usually leave the author’s voice precisely as it is, as long as it is consistent where it needs to be.
scr4:
As a patent attorney, I am the last person most people should come to for advice on grammar (how could anyone that writes a two page “claim” containing 30 separate paragraphs even begin to maintain the pretense that the claim is a single sentence?). However, on the issue of passive voice, I feel that I am very well versed. Use it. Also, split your infinitives into tiny pieces. Finally, feel free to turn any word in the english language into an adverb. Did you know that nuts are removably and threadedly recieved on the threaded shaft of a fastener?
cj finn, butchering of the english language in the name of science.
