Bill, thank you. Not to hammer a dead horse, but I wrote my
dissertation in the seventies. I was encouraged to use active voice and
first person. The most recent edition of the CBE Style Manual that I
actually own is the third edition (copyright 1972), though I have
generally had access to more recent (and massive) versions over the
years since.
From my third edition (page 5): "Write in the active voice unless you
have a good reason for writing in the passive. The active is the
natural voice, the one in which people commonly speak and write, and it
is less likely than the passive to lead to ambiguity."
There follows a series of explanations and examples detailing why first
person is generally preferable to other persons, especially in
describing methods where it provides clear explanation of who did what,
rather than the ambiguity of the third person passive, where one might
wonder who at all did the experiments described.
Thanks, David
On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 3:29 PM, William Silvert wrote:
Several subscribers have disagreed with my statement about
passive/active voice, and I stand corrected. Perhaps the case was best
stated by someone who wrote me off-list to say "I have noticed a
change in the last 4 years...I was instructed by many to use the
passive voice and to shy away from the active voice which very often
required the use of first person pronouns. But in the last year, a
growing trend has led away from the use of passives. Just today, when
haphazardly choosing 3 abstracts from the most recent issue of
Science, I found all to be written in the active voice and found the
first person 'we' in two of them...I think 'modern scientific writing'
may indeed be evolving again."
I am pleased to be shown wrong and commend the scientific community
for this stylistic improvement.
Bill Silvert
