Should avoid the passive voice in an undergraduate history thesis?
I suspect that the real reasons that people in the sciences use the passive voice are (a) because most of them aren’t very experienced writers and (b) it’s just the custom and no one questions it. (a) seems unlikely, since even experienced researchers do it. (b), perhaps to some extent, but I still maintain it makes more sense in passive voice. I don’t know enough about the science to rewrite, but I bet there’s a non-clunky way (which keeps the science intact) to rewrite the sentence I thought about this a bit. My first attempt was “Cells grew for 24h at 37°C…” but that’s not quite right. The purpose of incubating cells may be to grow them, but incubating them is not a guarantee of the cells growing, so it’s overstating it to say that cells grew. “Cells lived…” is similarly overstating things. “Cells existed for 24h at 37°C…” might preserve the meaning, but it’s just awkward, certainly more so than the use of the passive voice. I didn’t mean to obscure things with the technical j
This is not the same meaning as the other sentence. The other sentence was about Clinton being elected – this is about Clinton winning the election. If you are talking about how Clinton won the election through his profoundly impressive presentation of his hair, sure, use this one. But if you want to say that he was elected because his opponent was a kitten eating lizard monster from outer space, use the passive. There is a meaning difference. Look, I’m not saying one should NEVER use the passive. I’m saying that the active voice is almost always better, because it is more evocative and direct. Of course you shouldn’t sacrifice meaning (I think we were both reading what we wanted into the Clinton sentence). Use the passive voice if it’s the only way to preserve meaning. If you can preserve meaning AND use the active voice AND use un-awkward construction, use it. If you think you can’t do this, try harder, and then use the passive voice when you fair. How about: When voters saw Dole’s g
Devil, I agree with you that reproducibility is vital. In a way, I think we’re talking about apples and oranges. Surely DOING science isn’t the same as WRITING up a science experiment. A scientific article either describes what happened during an experiment or describes the findings of an experiment — or both. DURING the experiment, a specific person or persons manipulated substances. That’s exactly what happened. And that fact is neutral in regards to reproducibility. To somehow avoid “I” (which isn’t a specific description of a specific person) and to claim that makes the writing more objective is a kind of sham. It’s a rhetorical trick — and a poor one — to try to hide the fact that there was an experimenter involved. We all know that the experimenter was involved, so why hide it. In fact, when a scientist reports his findings, he can’t make any claim about reproducibility. All he CAN say is “I did X and Y was the result (for ME).” Then OTHER scientists can repeat the experiment
As both a history grad and a former creative writing major, I just think you should feel free to use the passive when it is the more evocative/effective way to express yourself. It helps to break up the patterns of your writing. Though from the 47 essays I marked a few weeks ago, I would say that undergraduate history students suffer more from having too many short, active tense, staccato sentences, with nothing to break up the rhythm, than from the errors they are suposed to be making (passive tense, run on sentences, kind of like this one). It felt like they were taking some generally good, but not to be taken like the word of God style advice much too far.
