Re: [Phys-L] passive or active voice

["Daniel V. Schroeder" <dschroeder@weber.edu>]

I tell my students to write lab reports in active voice, usually first-person plural:  "We plotted the velocity as a function of time and obtained a straight line," not "The velocity was plotted as a function of time and a straight line was obtained."  Active voice is more natural and vivid.  Passive voice says that science is abstract and impersonal.  It's also what politicians use when they want to avoid taking blame: "Mistakes were made."

Of course, good writers use passive voice regularly.  But they don't use it monotonously in sentence after sentence, which is what you get from most students when they're not allowed to use first-person pronouns.

Wikipedia has lots of good (and bad) examples, and some historical perspective on attitudes toward passive voice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice

At AJP we publish plenty of articles that use passive voice and plenty that use first person.  We even let singular authors write in first-person plural.  One thing I've noticed while editing manuscripts is that when authors write in passive voice, it's sometimes hard to tell what they did themselves and what was done previously by others.

Dan



> From: Bill Nettles <bnettles@uu.edu>
> Subject: [Phys-L] passive or active voice
> Date: September 11, 2013 3:06:19 PM MDT
> To: "Phys-L@Phys-L.org" <Phys-L@Phys-L.org>
> Reply-To: Phys-L@Phys-L.org
>
> When you have students write a report of an experimental activity, do you expect them to write primarily in active voice, passive voice, or do you let them choose?