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Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps only semi-related, but can anybody tell me how scientific journal writing fell into almost universal use of the passive voice? It drives me nuts every time I read that some more assumptions will be validated or that something else will be proven.

Which is to say, every single time I read an academic article.

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It's to make what was done (which is important to the paper) seem important and make who did it (which is less important to the paper) seem unimportant.

The interesting thing to me is that in mathematics journals, the universal pronoun is "we." The reason (I've been told) is that "we" represents the collaboration of the author and the reader to understand the results and proofs in the paper. This makes sense to me, because reading and writing mathematics is a skill entirely apart from most other types of discourse. (Of course, when I say "mathematics," I mean to include fields like theoretical computer science and others in which discourse is of the "theorem, proof, discussion" form.)

That is interesting. I instinctively use "we" when commenting code or talking myself through performing a novel task, in both cases for the same reason.

Steven G. Krantz talks about this in his "A Primer of Mathematical Writing". (A nice book, not only for mathematicians.)

It projects an air of lack of involvement and therefore neutrality/lack of bias?

People will often fall back to passive voice (and other linguistic acrobatics) when they don't want seem like they're weighing in one way or another. For example, accident reports will sometimes go on with something like "Braking maneuver attempted without success".

Novels are written to enable immersion and focus on the actors (protagonist); academic articles are written to be clear and neutral and focus on the subject matter.

Hence "I realized I loved her" and "the solution was lightly stirred for 10 minutes".

Passive my be neutral, but it's often far from clear and unfocussed. Most western languages aren't very good at expressing passive.

And how fiction came to be in the first person? Sounds like a valley girl telling a storey to her friends.

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