Not in mine!

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...

My high school science classes taught the "an experiment was conducted..." passive style of lab report writing as mandatory for science writing. That, and the idea of long, clause ridden, sentences. It wasn't until 20 years later when I went into industry that I realized how bad "traditional" scientific writing is. Clear, short sentences. Active voice. No flowery or euphemistic language. All make things so much more readable. But I think many of us were raised to associate simple writing with simple ideas, and taught we had to write things that only smart peopl could understand. I'm happy to see science writing trying to be more readable.

I find that clear and simple writing correlates with high quality work on the technical level. Especially at the top of the respective field.

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.

> 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.

That sounds like a good indication that the math you are thinking of was written to impress, rather than enlighten, you as a reader. I've seen far too much of that stuff in computer science papers, where dense math seems to be used defensively, rather than to bring clarity.

Yes, I hate it when they handwave over the tough core issues but then flesh out in detailed notation things that are unambiguous even in words, just to be able to define some Greek letter notations, which are then hardly ever referred to again in later parts of the paper.

Unnecessary equations often mean "this is totally a serious, rigorous paper, we do admirable and hard technical work here and deserve respect!".

IMO there's a good reason for passive voice in scientific literature: It's (literally) less subjective and creates some distance between the reader and the matter of investigation, which I personally find very useful. Besides, it's also often unclear who personal pronouns refer to in the first place. I have stopped counting the times I've seen single-author papers with phrases like

> 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.)

It's just a stylistic tradition in academic papers, similar to the royal "we". It's just a shorthand for "an author, or a group of authors, or the whole team/organization behind the research presented in this paper". You may think it's weird, but all traditions are weird when you think about it too much.

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.

> 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).

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.

> 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.

This would be easy to do in active voice. I could write "I did this, and I was wondering why that anomaly turned up, so I did yadda yadda" without ever involving a "you".

It would be, but unfortunately it seems usage of the personal pronoun "we" is an invitation for general sloppiness.

> (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.)

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.

Not everyone in science is a native speaker of English. In many languages it makes no sense to say "can see", seeing implies the ability. Similarly with "can hear". In fact, as a Hungarian native speaker it was very weird to me when my English teacher insisted I insert "can"s before hear and see in my writing.

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 see it, if you look at it (the right way).

You can hear it, if you're otherwise silent and focus on the sound.

This is a good point. I have been guilty of using "we" when I carried out the experiment entirely alone. I suppose it's a lie intended to increase credibility, but I never really thought about it before.

Actually, using the passive voice should have been more clear, because in most sentences encountered in scientific papers the patient is the topic of the sentence, not the agent.

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.

Having written a 100+ pages paper in passive voice in German whose writing style my supervisor called "very elegant and readable", I'm not sure it's the construction using auxiliary verbs. German is very similar when it comes to passive constructions but for some arcane reason in English passive voice doesn't sound as good or natural. (Not that passive voice is natural in German – it isn't. But it still sounds orders of magnitude better than in English.)

Thanks. Can you recommend where to read more about it - the whole chain of argument about English, direct object 'markers', etc.?

Unfortunately, I do not remember right now some good titles, but there are various books about comparative linguistics, which analyze the similarities and differences between languages and the various existing ways of expressing the same content.

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.

Thanks! When I was pretty young, I studied a language that used word terminations (and other means) without word order. I was too young too appreciate the linguistic differences, nor did I understand why a certain word order was chosen. It would give a lot more flexibility.

I am going to lookup what you wrote about the evolution and use of active voice in English - something I always wondered about.

I was a doc reviewer in a commercial organisation, checking both technical reports and commercial writing (bids and contracts).

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.

I fought so hard with that in grad school 10 years ago. A number of newer papers in my field were written in the active voice, and I dramatically preferred that approach. My supervisor, however, was adamant that everything needed to be in the passive voice. He won, naturally, because I needed him to sign off on things. I do wonder how different that conversation would be today.

Don't follow rules blindly though, in either direction. Passive can be a better fit sometimes. Long sentences can be okay sometimes.

I'd be pissed at a prof for having such rigid overgeneralized rules.

"at 17 minutes, the reagent was added" ... by god or universal happenstance.

Or the PI, or a technician, or a grad student. The point is, it does not matter who did it.

Exactly. The only "right" way to choose active vs. passive is to decide what you want to emphasize.

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."

Indeed. Choosing one or the other is making a choice about what should be emphasised. Any form of writing is subjective, and scientific writing is not different.

When I taught writing in grad school, I actively (pun intended) pushed students away from passive voice. Active voice is generally easier to read, and typically forces the writer to clarify more things within a sentence. There are, of course, certain instances where passive voice better suits the context.

Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.

Interesting that there was teaching on how to write at all. In my technical PhD in Germany we had zero instruction on writing other than feedback from the prof near deadlines. You're just supposed to pick it up by reading papers (plus the experience of having written a bachelor and master thesis where you're guided by a PhD student who may themselves not be great at writing).

When I went to uni in Sweden, there was a mandatory course in academic writing as part of CS program. The learning objectives was more than just a styleguide proofreading by supervisors though, as methodologies, data collection and paper structures was covered. Pretty much the scientific process really.

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.

We have seminar courses for this where master students do some lit review (mainly based around one paper) and present that work in a longer form writing.

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.

Oh good god :) Picking up writing from reading the average paper is likely injurious to the health of your future readers. Few papers are well-written and you're likely to unknowingly pick up bad habits from reading the average paper. If your advisor was actively training you in good writing and providing you critical feedback on sentence construction, paragraph organization, the flow of ideas from one section to the next, then sure, you wouldn't really require a class. But I doubt the average advisor has the bandwidth for such feedback, esp. in my field of biology.

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 mean, you wouldn't emulate the average paper though, but the ones from the best labs in your field, the papers that get awards etc.

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.

Fair enough. It does sound like you fall/fell on the more advanced side of the grad student curve though. +1 on 90% of papers having nothing much to say.

> typically forces the writer to clarify more things within a sentence.

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?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27078738

Right, I would say that's just sloppy writing in general and not sloppy because of the use of active voice (and certainly an example where passive voice is better).

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.

> 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.

A lot of writing guidance at the academic level discourages passive voice and prefers royal We’s. Passive voice also gets boring really quick.

The norm changes wildly from field to field: the voice, style, pronouns, etc...

Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword is a good book on the subject.