Isn't that just the norm for scientific papers?
I think you're right; it's my impression that passive voice has been the traditional style for scientific papers. However, the winds of change have been blowing for the last 15 or 20 years. Editors of most scientific journals now recommend using active voice wherever possible.
I frequently fight with my collaborators over this. In a nutshell I think the passive voice style of science writing is unclear, and dishonest in that it pretends the researcher was not involved in the research.
Check out p12 and p13 here: https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/events/professional-d...
and: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/01/active_is_better_th...
I'd be pissed at a prof for having such rigid overgeneralized rules.
For example in AI if you read the papers coming from the best labs the writing tends to be on the point, short sentences, almost informal-sounding, actually someone telling you what and why they did and what they found. Not merely conforming to arbitrary rules set up by bitter mediocre "scholars".
But yes, people who are afraid they have nothing to say try to hide it behind long sentences with incomprehensible nested structures and overjargonized vocabulary. Plus equations that are designed to impress rather than enlighten.
Interesting, I don't think I've seen any discussion before about clear, unpretentious presentation of math. I'll have to consciously evaluate this better as I read papers.
Personally I think mathematical clarity is tougher to evaluate because I would not be confident enough to always know if it's the author or just me.
Unnecessary equations often mean "this is totally a serious, rigorous paper, we do admirable and hard technical work here and deserve respect!".
> We investigated X
(Who's we?)
and
> From equation (1.2.3) we see that,
(Who is "we"? The author? The author and other readers who are smarter than me? It cannot possibly be "the author and I" because I don't "see that" at all.)
Also, your second "we" isn't even that, I think that's just good old-fashioned generic pronoun (because English normally doesn't allow a sentence without a subject). Basically the same as in sentences like:
> In Elbonia you are not allowed to drive after dark.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen “we” used as an indefinite pronoun. It’s usually “one”, “you”, or “they”, depending on formality and context.
In this context, it seems obvious to me that it stands for the author(s) and the reader, in a (maybe misguided) attempt to reduce the distance between them and involve the reader in the narrative.
Thank you for putting it so succinctly, this is exactly what I meant to say: When I'm reading a scientific paper, I don't want to be involved in the narrative. Don't speak to me; let the facts speak for themselves.
I would tend to prefer “we can see” (or “we can deduce”, or something to that effect) rather than “we see”. In the first case, it’s a statement that it is possible for you to see it too, if you think about it for a while. As you say, the latter is a statement of fact that is often wrong and can come across as condescending.
What do you mean you "can hear" the loud music coming from the neighbor's flat? Do you in fact hear it or do you just have the ability to hear it and can also switch it off or something? It's a quirk of English that I just had to memorize.
You can hear it, if you're otherwise silent and focus on the sound.
When describing an experimental method, it literally does not matter if a Nobel laureate, fresh-faced undergrad, robot, or zombie added the reagent. The point is that it was added, and so the passive voice works fine.
However, perhaps it is important that the reader understands how carefully patients were evaluated, rather than the fact that they were evaluated at all. Then, you might choose the active voice and write "A panel of 17 experts carefully evaluated each patient" instead of "patients were evaluated by 17 experts."
I recommended to authors that they should use active voice because it usually made it easier to explicitly identify the intended actors and avoid ambiguity about who should do what. E.g. a bid author should prefer "$COMPANY will do X" rather than "X will be done" because it avoids confusion over whether X is a $COMPANY or $CUSTOMER responsibility. Obviously authors could still write "X will be done by $COMPANY" but I found that they would often forget to identify the actor if they chose passive voice.
Unfortunately, in English, if you want to make the patient the topic of the sentence you are forced to use the passive voice, because there is no marker for the direct object of a verb, and then the sentence becomes less readable, because in English the passive voice is constructed with auxiliary verbs, so it is more complex than the active voice.
These are defects of the English language, so the recommendation to avoid the passive voice is specific to English and also to a few other modern European languages, which have also lost the features that enable a free order of the words.
In an ideal language, it should be possible to use a standard order of the words to express their syntactic roles without additional words, but there should also exist some optional prepositions or postpositions marking each possible syntactic role, to enable an arbitrary order of the words when desired.
In such a language you could choose freely the topic of a sentence without being constrained because some choices are awkward, like when using the English passive voice.
Most ancient languages, including most ancient Indo-European languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek, allowed a free order of the words, because there were markers for each syntactic role, like agent, patient, instrument, beneficiary and so on (i.e. the so-called cases).
Nevertheless, at the stage where the old Indo-European languages became attested in writing, they had a very serious defect. Even if the so-called case terminations of the words were originally a small set of post-positions corresponding to the syntactic roles, due to various phonetic evolutions conditioned by the adjacent sounds present in words, the original small set of markers had diverged into a very large set of word terminations with many distinct variants for each syntactic role, the so-called word declensions.
Because remembering such a large set of word terminations became too difficult, most modern European languages have abandoned the old declensions. Some languages use enough prepositions, possibly together with some remnants of the old case terminations, to allow a free order of the words.
English however, depends a lot on the standard order of the words to convey their syntactic roles and it has only limited means of expression for supporting a different word order.
While in the Indo-European languages the too irregular word declensions could not persist, there are other language families with a much more regular structure for the syntactic role markers, while still having enough markers to allow a free word order.
It is weird that the European linguists of the previous centuries considered the regular languages (the so-called agglutinative languages or isolant languages) as "primitive" while considering the "flexionar" classic Indo-European languages as "superior" and "advanced".
In fact even if the flexionar classic Indo-European languages evolved from some older agglutinative language, their irregular declensions were a serious defect and not a sign of progress.
Unfortunately, because the language changes have always been done mostly by the less educated people, without having any kind of grand plan of how to best improve the language, the necessary simplifications of the language have also been frequently accompanied by a loss of expressiveness, like in English.
I am going to lookup what you wrote about the evolution and use of active voice in English - something I always wondered about.
Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.
This seemed to be quite needed for students to get up to speed. I was from Finland, where this subject was brought up before uni.
For what it's worth, I remember my supervisor calling bullshit on my then dense and overly academic writing and I thank them for it. It was a process of un-learning bad patterns or preconcieved notions about the writing process.
Recommend.
This is also "just" learning by doing. There is some back-and-forth with PhD students who help with the structure, but there's no explicit instruction.
In the context where I taught, most students coming into the PhD program had no training in writing whatsoever. The first round of essays that people turned in were typically very poorly written. Most folks really needed the training in my view.
I think it's actually better to seek writing advice on the Internet (not from randos, but if you're cut out for a PhD you should be able to tell apart crap advice from good ones.) I'm pretty sure it's better than whatever my university could offer as a course.
And just as everywhere, 90% of everything is crap. Perhaps more than 90% of papers are crap and 90% of academics have nothing to say and write terribly to hide it.
Hmmm I don't think that's the case at all – if at all, active voice is less clear and "sloppy". (See the examples I mentioned here[0].) But maybe we interpret the term "clarify" in different ways?
You're right in terms of what I meant by "clarify", which was more about writing that looking less "sloppy". The examples I think about aren't ones where the investigators are referring to themselves by "We" but where you're writing a paper about molecules interacting with each other. So something like "A activates B, which in turn inactivates C" reads more smoothly than any of its passive-voice counterparts.
Yes, because there is a clear subject and the fact that one thing activates another is important (at least in scientific papers, causality is kind of the point). Using the passive voice in this case is clumsy and awkward. On the other hand, there are legitimate cases for the passive voice when the subject is unclear/unknown/unimportant. Forcing the active voice then results in the overuse of meaningless pronouns or vague words just because there needs to be a subject. Good writing is using the right construct, which depends on context.
Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword is a good book on the subject.