Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has had a Huck Finn moment with regard to paper writing style:
I know that I'm not supposed to use the first person plural when writing papers. Frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn. I am going to say, "we did this" and "we did that".
This made me blink a little, because I've never thought that was a rule. In fact, one of the things I had beaten into my head when I was a grad student writing papers was that scientific papers ought to be written in the first person plural and the active voice.
There definitely seems to be a belief that scientific writing should be passive and impersonal, though. I've been told by students that other departments on campus insist that lab reports be written in the passive voice, and that the first person is to be avoided at all costs. So maybe this is a discipline-specific rule.
Which makes it a good topic for a three question poll:
What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Leave your answers in the comments. I'd also be interested to see if this depends on your career stage (do professors favor passive voice, while grad students are more active?), but that's optional.
(Also, feel free to leave comments quibbling with the wording, pointing out choices that I left off, answering questions I didn't ask, and blaming the Democrats in Congress for everything that's wrong with academic writing. I don't particularly want any of those things, but they're inevitable, so I might as well mention them in the instructions...)
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As an art history student, the most common comment I found scrawled in red pen at the top of my paper was "PASSIVE VOICE!!!!!"
Honestly, I hated it. I always wrote in the third person, especially when describing works of art, but I found that the passive voice made my writing sound exactly like all of those terribly dry, boring, haughtily written textbooks that I made a point of not reading.
Art history writing is boring because it is written in the passive voice, which makes it less conversational and, therefore, much less engaging.
I just had a seminar about scientific writing that encouraged us to use the first person and the active voice. Although, most people still can't bring themselves to say "I killed five mice" instead of "Five mice were sacrificed."
I think it's a historical thing. At school more than thirty years ago, I was taught that scientific experiments must always be reported in the third person and passive voice. This still applied, in chemistry at least, through my university career up to the mid-80s.
I was a bit shocked when I first saw "we" in a medical paper some time in the mid/late 80s. Writing in the first person plural active voice has become noticeably more widespread since, though I imagine some disciplines may have adopted it faster than others. I'm glad it's now the norm in my current area of medical-related research - it's pleasanter both to write and to read. And, in my opinion, more honest.
I write in the active voice and in the first-person plural. This seems to be common in my corners of math and CS, and is explicitly encouraged in texts like Higham's Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences. I've read a fair number of papers in passive voice, but I don't think they were in the majority. Perhaps they just weren't in the majority of the papers that I remember.
Active voice, first person plural.
In grant applications, sometimes I will even use first person singular.
You already know my opinion on the topic. :-D
From a 2nd year grad student:
What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
Engineering
Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
Third person is the convention.
Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Doesn't really matter to my professors, but I see passive voice most often in the papers I read. (Third person seems to lend itself to more readily to passive voice.)
You use both "I" and "we" on a single author paper. "I" refers solely to you, while "we" refers to you and the reader. Thus,
"I plan to pursue this further in a future paper."
"We will see that the derivation is incomplete."
First year grad student, psych/neurosci. For publications, first person plural, active voice, is both the style that I see and the style that seems to be encouraged across all the life and social sciences.
My two cents:
We use the 1st person plural when writing papers (ultra-cold atoms theory), since this was the preference of our PhD supervisor. We also used this during our PhD thesis, which makes us sound rather schizophrenic (or royal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralis_majestatis ). During our masters project, the passive voice was used, since this was the choice of our masters supervisor.
I think that 1st person plural is the best choice when writing papers with multiple authors - but 1st person singular does sound slightly arrogant if you are single author; however I think that the passive voice makes difficult technical material even more hard to read, so in this case there is no ideal solution for single authors other than to collaborate more :) .
My preference is for active voice and first person plural. There are times when passive voice is appropriate, but most sentences should be active. Even when the paper has only one author, I habitually use first person plural--in some frequently arising contexts, such as in a derivation ("we find that Y = f(X)"), the "we" means "the reader and I".
I have never noticed any particular bias against active voice per se. However, I have encountered bias against first person pronouns. As recently as the mid 1990s, a journal editor asked me to modify a manuscript to eliminate first person pronouns. When "I" and "we" are forbidden words, passive voice often becomes the only allowed way to say something that the authors did: "The data were processed..." vs. "Smith and Jones (1992) found that..."
I'm in a boundary field, physics/geophysics. The journal whose editor objected to first person pronouns is a physics journal, but I can't conclude anything from a sample size of one. The geophysics journals have not (at least during my career) objected to first person pronouns.
In ecology, active voice is the standard. "I" to talk about yourself, "we" to talk about you and reader, or if there are multiple authors.
However, there is a subtle distinction between active and passive that is useful but rarely appreciated. If I write
We conclude that if you push something hard enough, it will fall over.
the emphasis is on who is concluding. You could write
We (as opposed to anybody else) conclude that if you push something hard enough, it will fall over.
Now consider the two sentences
We used simulations to evaluate the response to pushing.
Simulations were used to evaluate the response to pushing.
and think of them as
We (as opposed to somebody else) used simulations to evaluate the response to pushing.
Simulations (as opposed to analytical solutions) were used to evaluate the response to pushing.
The context could easily make one of these more relevant than the others. So, sometimes I (unlike others) mix active and passive voice. Better papers (as contrasted to worse papers) are produced as a result.
My take on this is thoroughly documented at:
http://mattleifer.info/2009/03/13/the-three-scientific-wes/
For the record, my answers are:
> What field of professional literature are you most
> familiar with?
Physics, math and philosophy (anything to do with quantum foundations or quantum information) but that is irrelevant because my opinions on writing style seem to be thoroughly at odds with what everyone else in the field does.
> Should papers be written using first person, second
> person, or third person pronouns?
First person if you are describing something that you actually did, but eliminate unnecessary pronouns that are not of this type.
> Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Active, but that is not the same thing as allowing hundreds of unnecessary pronouns.
See my blog post for more details.
4th year grad student
Astronomy, first person, ACTIVE ACTIVE ACTIVE.
Historians use both active and passive voices. First person (singular or plural) is rare since there is less emphasis on experimentation and more on interpreting existing evidence.
* What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
As an astrochemistry grad student, I'm quite heavily interdisciplinary -- and very confusing it can be, too. Chemistry and astronomy have very different styles...
Generally speaking (it can very with sub-fields, journals, etc), chemistry papers tend to be more formal than astronomy papers (i.e. using wordings like "the author would like to note..." as opposed to "we found that...".
Actually, it seems to very from journal to journal as well, with some definite geographical bias. Possibly as a cultural factor, American journals tend to have more active voice. Here in the UK, we get taught as undergrads to use passive third person if we're ever in doubt.
* Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
Perhaps as a remnant of all the chemistry lab reports I wrote up as an undergrad ("to 250ml of dilute sulfuric acid, was added 8g of..."), I tend to default to third person. Which can seem a bit archaic. On the other hand, dare I say it, first person can occasionally seem a bit childish in a "we did this, we did that" kind of way. Given a choice, I think it's safest to avoid pronouns wherever possible (concentrate on what was done, as opposed to what "we" did).
Also, I find it easier to change third person into first rather than vice versa. I've seen papers written by any one given author use first or third, depending on the context.
I've never read anything written in the second person.
* Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Frankly, both as and where appropriate. It depends on the section, IMHO. For describing methodologies, active is best. In discussion sections, I prefer to read passive voiced literature -- active can feel a bit like opinions are being forced onto you, while passive can allow space to draw conclusions of your own.
---
...Sorry, all of that was somewhat more excessive than I'd anticipated!
Quoting from the AIP Style manual:
Further good advice: "We" to mean the (single) author and the reader, but not simply as a substitute for "I": "We have already seen" and "I have calculated."
Microbial ecology. ABSOLUTELY active voice, first person plural (except in your dissertation, which should be first person singular). Passive voice invariably adds unwanted words, resulting in less information in the same amount of space.
Geology professor, PhD from the 90's, teaches the department writing class: depends on context.
For discussing something the authors did: 1st person (singular or plural depending on number of authors), active voice.
For describing results: 3rd person, active voice - center the writing around the observations, not around the person making the observations. ("The rocks were metamorphosed at 500 °C," not "We found that the rocks were metamorphosed at 500 °C.")
Passive voice can also be ok, depending on the circumstance (when the action is all that's important, and the thing that did the action is either unknown or a distraction from the point of the sentence).
I've seen a lot more 1st person/active voice in journals lately, especially in the abstracts of geophysics articles. In some cases, it improves the writing, but in others, I lose the point of the paper in all the "We measured..." and "We show that..."
1. Biochemistry/pharmaceutical sciences
2. First person (usually plural)
3. Active
I find that first person active is the easiest to read. I find fewer errors in procedures when they are described in the first person active. But I have the hardest time with my co-authors and reviewers of journals who keep trying to force everything into 3rd person passive. That style just makes me fall asleep.
And I just realized that my example of "3rd person, active voice" was actually passive voice. A better example might be "Intrusion of basaltic magma heated the rock to 500 °C." But passive voice can be the most efficient if you know something happened, but you don't know the cause. (Often the case in geology.)
What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
Biochemistry/analytical chemistry
Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
First person plural, if active.
Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Depends on the sentence!
I'm not sure there is a hard and fast rule; rather there are some contexts where an active voice makes more sense (in which case, plural first person), e.g.
"Here, we show that...", "We propose that ..." "In order to XXX, we decided to investigate YYY".
Other times, a passive voice is better (particularly in materials and methods sections). Generally, I'd go for readability over strict rules.
Physics.
First person plural (when speaking as the author).
Active.
They measured this, we calculated that.
Math here. When I wrote my first paper, I did the whole thing in first-person singular. I used a lot of active verbs ("I claim. . .").
The very first thing my adviser made me do was revise them all to first-person plurals, and to take out a lot of the first-person verbs, by e.g. changing "I claim X is Y" to "Lemma. X is Y."
In the acknowledgments I use third-person ("the author was supported on NSF . . .").
That all seems to be common practice in the literature. But for what it's worth I'd prefer to use "I" if it's a single-author paper.
What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
1. Meteorology
2. Depends on the following question.
3. Usually passive, especially to avoid using "I did...".
I tend to use "Model X was run" when describing a numerical simulation, and "We measured Y" for field experiments, perhaps because the former is repeatable (impersonal) and the latter refers to a specific event that happened.
The papers on my desk have a mixture but I think they lean toward the passive.
Biology. I use active, but, until ~6-7 years ago, many granting agencies didn't like the active voice.
Astrophysics. If there are any rules, then at least some people are breaking them. However, I think the preponderance of evidence leans toward first-person active.
There seems to be no consensus on whether single-author works should use "I" or "we". I use "I" for my single-author papers, but given the ongoing decline in the frequency of solo authorship, this might not be a significant problem for the field much longer anyway.
Hep-th/hep-ph: I don't give a shit as long as one can understand what the paper is supposed to say.
Computer science / linguistics. First person active whenever possible. My personal bugbear: "It was felt" ARGH!
hep-ph: "We", active voice most of the time. (I have to consciously make things more formal sometimes, when collaborators turn out not to like discussions that go like "Let's figure out what happens to particle X when...")
In high school (1960s) and Caltech (late 1960s, early 1970s) the passive voice was drummed into us for academic papers (especially in Math and Science). What changed my feelings on this was that one of my first papers, on a main result of my PhD research (interdisciplinary Math, CS, Chem, Bio, Physics) used the passive voice. "It has been determined that .... [long equations followed]." Not one reader of that paper whom I talked to, who didn't already know me or heard me talk about this at a conference, seemed (on dialogue) to realize that I HAD DISCOVERED these equations. Thereafter I may have strayed too far into Gonzo Science ournalism at times, but I never "hid my light under a bushel" again. In grad school, the Chairman of my department castigated my "purple prose" but used it himself at the drop of a hat. So I wonder if there's a double standard in ANY indostrination of proper scientific communications protocol.
Field: Astronomy.
Pronouns: If I'm writing a single-author paper, then I'm with Aaron Bergman: "I" for things you did, pedagogical "we" for guiding the reader along where appropriate. I find single-author papers that relentlessly use "we" a bit silly. ("Look, I can tell there's just one of you, and you're not the Queen, so why are you pretending to be plural?") A multiple-author paper naturally uses "we".
(How would you use the "third person" in writing a paper, anyway? Is a group-authored paper supposed to say things like "They used an n-body simulation with ..." and "They
obtained the images at Telescope X ..." ?)
Active vs passive: Whatever's clearer and less boring; occasional alternation doesn't hurt. There is a tendency for people to overuse the passive voice in astronomical papers, which can produce clotted and stilted prose. On the other hand, it's a bit silly to go overboard the other way and pretend the passive voice is wrong...
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I mostly work in computational neuroscience and vision research. I write in first-person plural, active voice (I guess that I'll use first-person singular if I ever publish a single-author paper).
There's two trends I can see in the field:
1) Older papers are more often in third-person passive voice. Never papers are more often first-person active.
2) A higher-ranked journal, more well-known authors and better papers tend to more often use first-person and active voice; unknown journals, authors and results tend to use passive voice. It may be a compensation thing.
Field: Ecology
1st person
active voice
It's worth noting that in Ecology this is journal specific, with British journals going passive voice, third person, and most other journals increasingly going active voice, first person. I'm a Canadian who did his PhD in Australia and now work in the US (there's a grammatially challenged sentence for you!) - so I'm hopelessly confused with spelling and grammar.
In particular, I find the need to use past tense awkward when referring to things that still exist now, like analyses, models, and other papers - much to the dismay of my more grammatically refined collaborators.
Most of my technical literature is computer software, and I assume that code comments are the relevant prose. I use two styles, the imperative when the action is relatively straight forward, and the first person plural when a more extensive description is necessary. You can think of the former case as cookbook code, e.g. put all of the entries into a hash table, keyed by their k-ids, bake at 350F for 15 minutes, look up each k-unit's j-id using the baked hash table, and so on. In the latter case, I use "we" to refer to myself and all the poor bastard processors that will have to execute the code, so it isn't exactly first PERSON. Whenever something gets hairy enough or obscure enough to require extensive discussion of what the code is supposed to be doing, and often actual does, I find it useful to have a present actor for focus.
----
I think mathematicians tend to be the fussiest about language. Gian Carlo Rota noted one mathematician who began a lecture "Let A be a foobar set, and let B be a foobar set." A heckler in the audience protested, "Why can't you just say 'Let A and B be foobar sets?" The replay, a dignified, "What if A and B are the same set?"
I am most familiar with spectroscopy and optics literature, from both the chemistry and physics point of view.
I see papers written in both the first and third person, with authors sometimes switching freely between them. I find it personally uncomfortable to write papers in the first person, because, in the long-forgotten past, told me that I shouldn't do so. Thus, I write in the third person. I am entirely comfortable reading papers written either way.
I try to write in the active voice as much as possible by making the sample or the experiment the subject of the sentence (e.g. "The crystal fluoresced strongly at 580 nm."), but I often end up in the passive voice. As I don't read scientific papers for entertainment, I don't particularly care as a reader if they're a collection of dry, passive sentences, so long as they're complete and unambiguous.
Given the options from the original question, though, I am sorely tempted to write the first draft of my next paper in the second-person present ("You convert the fluorescence spectrum into cross sections using reciprocity. You then use the integrated cross-section of the 580 nm line to construct a laser model.")
Mathematics professor here. First person plural all through my career. I tend to write a lot of passive and also long sentences because that's natural and elegant in my native language. They get corrected in the final version (earlier by my advisor, now by me).
Computer science student -- just defended a couple weeks ago. First person plural. I use some mix of active and passive, but my advisor prefers all active.