‘Use the active voice whenever possible’: The Impact of Style Guidelines in Medical Journals

Millar, Neil; Budgell, Brian; Fuller, K.

doi:10.1093/applin/ams059

Cited by 25 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The varied proportions in Sci lend some support to this suspicion. To this end, I agree with Millar, Budgell and Fuller [24] that the anomaly could have been due to the vague nature of the advice given to authors. It is unclear, for instance, what "when suitable" means.…”

Section: Comparisons Among Journalsmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…In consequence, the findings of Millar, Budgell and Fuller [24] may be under-reported. In a slightly different vein, Seoane [8] compared the use of passives in scientific articles published in two time periods, 1961 and 1991-92.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…This uniformity is perhaps reflective of the need for scientific writing to be as precise as possible. This may help to explain the preference for the basic passive over other passive forms in the corpus since the addition of other auxiliary verbs is either impossible (20) The pervasiveness of the bare passive in the corpus also deserves mention, given how it is often bypassed in studies [7,24]. The data in Table 2 show that almost one in ten clauses in the corpus contained a bare passive.…”

Section: Passive Formsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…More recently, Millar, Budgell and Fuller [24] investigated the use of the passive voice in 297 research articles, also in the field of medicine. Unlike the study by Amdur, Kirwan and Morris [23], the authors computed the mean (rather than the median) frequency of passives per sentence.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In view of the median-mean difference, a comparison of the results from both studies is difficult. The work of Millar, Budgell and Fuller [24] also relied on an automatic process to retrieve the passive constructions by using the following string: [ There are, however, two problems with this approach. The first is that the string restricted the analysis to only declaratives, since interrogatives have a slightly different grammatical structure.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The passive voice in scientific writing. The current norm in science journals

Alvin¹

2014

JCOM

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In contrast to past consensus, many authors now feel that the passive voice compromises the quality of scientific writing. However, studies involving scientific articles are rare. Using a corpus of 60 scientific research articles from six journals, this study examined the proportion of passives used, and the contexts and forms in which they occurred. The results revealed that about 30% of all clauses were passive clauses. The canonical form was most pervasive, followed by the bare passive; together, they constituted more than a quarter of all clauses analyzed. Passives were typically used in main clauses, followed by relative and adverbial clauses. Roughly 29% of all passives were located in the methodology section. Based on the results, the proportion of passives in scientific writing may stabilize at about 30%. It is unlikely to dramatically drop any further since the trend suggests that passives are still widely used in the methodology section. KEYWORDS: Scholarly publishing, science writing 1 Context and objectivesA cursory glance at the numerous writing guides available, both on the Internet and in printed form, reveals a clear shift in consensus regarding the use of the passive voice in scientific writing. While the prevalent use of the passive voice was characteristic of scientific discourse in the major part of the 20th century [1,2], the situation today is rather different. Many writing guides favor the use of the active voice for reasons of clarity and conciseness [3]. In their writing guide for scientific English, Day and Sakaduski [4] state this preference even more directly -"the passive voice should be avoided".Yet, as Ding [1] has shown in his work involving corpora from the 18th century to the end of the 19th century, early scientific discourse actually favored the active voice. The move towards the passive voice in the 20th century arose as a result of the increasing demands for scientific discourse to be objective, in the sense that the writing should ideally represent the world "in terms of objects, things, and materials" [1] rather than humans. As a consequence, scientific writing took on a decidedly object-or thing-oriented character [5,6]. With the preference for the active voice in present-day scientific writing, we appear to have come full circle.Indications from an informal survey among postgraduates at a Singaporean university, however, suggest that not many may be aware of this current preference. In fact, 90 of JCOM 13(01)(2014)A03

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Section: Comparisons Among Journalsmentioning

confidence: 65%

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 91%