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Subject:Usage: 1st Person and Passive Voice From:"Margaret L. FalerSweany" <mfsweany -at- MTU -dot- EDU> Date:Sat, 31 Jan 1998 09:06:31 -0500
I did my Master's thesis on the use of the passive voice
and learned some interesting things that may explain why
it's used so heavily (about 26% of sentences in a
scientific article according to a major study). The passive
construction is a powerful linguistic tool that we usually
don't notice in well-constructed writing. Please understand
that I am not advocating never converting sentences to the
active; I am advocating judicial use of such changes. Use
of the active does not guarantee well-written articles;
they can be just as turgid, pedantic, didactic, etc. as one
that heavily relies on the passive and avoids first person.
True, the passive enables the "doer" to avoid highly
visible responsibility for the action/results reported, but
according to scientists I talked to, that responsibility is
implicit in the article. Those reading a scientific article
know about the lab and or authors (or believe they do and
assume that peer review assures that responsibility is
assigned and, thus, doesn't have to be explicitly stated
frequently throughout the article.)
Use of the passive not only shifts the attention to the
action from the actant, it often enables scientists to
avoid what they consider worse "sins" such as
anthropomorphism and teleology that can arise when things
"act."
Psycholinguistically, use of the passive enables the writer
to follow a standard expectation in English: provide given
(old) information before new. To maintain this pattern the
writer will often switch between active and passive without
thought. This need to maintain old/new patterns seems
especially visible in compound sentences.
Additionally, it appears that altering some sentences to
the active may severely (in the thoughts of the
writer/reader) change the semantic meaning intended. My
reading suggested this was particularly true when the
writer was using models such as "ought to be," "might be,"
and "should be" which are strongly linked to
intention/probability/chance relationships.
Margaret FalerSweany
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Humanities, WAHC 319
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931
mfsweany -at- mtu -dot- edu
906-482-0367
