Chad Orzel is wondering about the origin of some irritating habits in science writing. His first point puts the finger right on the issue:
Myth 1: First-person pronouns are forbidden in scientific writing. I have no idea where students get the idea that all scientific writing needs to be in the passive voice, but probably three quarters of the papers I get contain sentences in which the syntax has been horribly mangled in order to avoid writing in the first person.
It’s not exactly right to call this a “myth”; as Andre from Biocurious points out in comments, the injuction to use the passive voice is often stated quite explicitly. There’s even an endlessly amusing step-by-step instruction guide for converting your text from active to passive voice. What would Strunk and White say?
The same goes for using “we” rather than “I,” even if you’re the only person writing. There are also guides that make this rule perfectly explicit. The refrain in this one is:
Write in the third person (“The aquifer covers 1000 square kilometers”) or the first person plural (“We see from this equation that acceleration is proportional to force”). Avoid using “I” statements.
Interestingly, these habits did not just emerge organically as scientific communication evolved — they were, if you like, designed. I learned this from a talk given by Evelyn Fox Keller some years ago, which unfortunately I’ve never been able to find in print. It goes back to the earliest days of the scientific revolution, when Francis Bacon and others were musing on how this new kind of approach to learning about the world should be carried out. Bacon decided that it was crucially important to emphasize the objectivity of the scientific process; as much as possible, the individual idiosyncratic humanity of the scientists was to be purged from scientific discourse, making the results seem as inevitable as possible.
To this end, Bacon was quite programmatic, suggesting a list of ways to remove the taint of individuality from the scientific literature. Passive voice was encouraged, and it was (apparently, if Keller was right and I’m remembering correctly) Bacon who first insisted that we write “we will show” in the abstracts of our single-author papers.
It always seemed a little unnatural to me, and when it came time to write a single-author paper (which I tend not to do, since collaborating is much more fun) I went with the first-person singular. I decided that if it was good enough for Sidney Coleman, it should be good enough for me.
Keller has a more well-known discussion of the rhetoric of Francis Bacon, reprinted in Reflections on Gender and Science. Here she examines Bacon’s personification of the figure of Nature, specifically with regard to gender roles. Bacon was one of the first to introduce the metaphor of Nature as a woman to be seduced/conquered. Sometimes the imagery is gentle, sometimes less so; here are some representative quotes from Bacon to give the gist.
“Let us establish a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature.”
“My dear, dear boy, what I plan for you is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock. And from this association you will insure an increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages, to wit, a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen.”
“I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”
“I invite all such to join themselves, as true sons of knowledge, with me, that passing by the outer courts of nature, which numbers have trodden, we may find a way at length into her inner chambers.”
“For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.”
[Science and technology do not] “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”
But, while Nature is a shy female waiting to be seduced and conquered, we also recognize that Nature is a powerful, almost God-like force. Tellingly, when Bacon talks about this aspect, the metaphorical gender switches, and now Nature is all too male:
“as if the divine nature enjoyed the kindly innocence in such hide-and-seek, hiding only in order to be found, and with characteristic indulgence desired the human mind to join Him in this sport.”
So much meaning lurking in a few innocent pronouns! We like to pretend that the way we do science, and the way we conceptualize our activity, is more or less inevitable; but there are a lot of explicit choices along the way.
The third person/first person has a reasonable rule behind it (which I confess to not always following). “We” refers to the author and the reader while “I” refers solely to the author. In other words, one might write “we can see that” and “I will show that” in the same paper.
That’s true, but different; there are a large number of single-author papers (the vast majority, if my impression is correct) in which the word “I” is always replaced by “we,” whether appropriate or not.
When we had to write term papers in third-semester QM, Prof. Rajagopal addressed this specifically:
I wonder who will be the first prescriptivist in this thread to castigate Aaron Bergman for splitting an infinitive and Rajagopal (in absentia) for ending a sentence with a preposition. Now that’s the sort of nonsense up with which we should not put. . . .
Aaron has a good point about the “pedagogical” we — the sort of “we” a lecturer might use in stepping through an argument (“So we can see here that…”). But I agree with Sean that there are a lot of single-author papers where “I” is never used, even when it would be the logical choice (“I used the following data reduction technique…”).
When I’m reading a paper like that, there’s a mischeivous part of my mind that wants to know if the author thinks he or she is royalty…
Passive voice is a common problem in beginning writers, but most writing teachers are more interested in excising it than in nurturing it. Scientific prose is the only exception and it’s always seemed absurd to me, objectivity (which is a lovely myth anyway) or not.
“What would Strunk and White say?” AAAIIIIEEEEE! That’s what.
Agree completely. When I wrote my first single-author paper I started the abstract with the word “I”. I hope I also did split some infinitives and I’m sure I ended some sentences with prepositions. I also tend to wonder if authors are using the royal we.
Here’s a good take on writing papers by the way:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jrs/sins.html
“I invite all such to join themselves, as true sons of knowledge, with me, that passing by the outer courts of nature, which numbers have trodden, we may find a way at length into her inner chamber.”
lol Blake, I guess we should hope no one asks how can knowledge have sons.
I hope that no feminists object, and are appeased by Nature being feminine
Though “finding a way at length into her inner chamber” – had me in stitches
could it also be allegorical – as in of things (or strings) to come!
On the subject of Bacon — I’m not convinced it’s appropriate to lay all the blame on him. For one thing, he was writing at a time when most scientific reports were still done in Latin, so it’s not clear how style in Latin would necessarily carry over to style in, say, English. (And did papers in his time really have “abstracts” as we think of them?)
For another, it’s my impression that first-person-singular scientific writing continued for quite some time after that. For example, Newton’s paper on splitting light with a prism is full of the first person singular, and even the occasional personal digression (“Amidst these thoughts I was forced from Cambridge by the Intervening Plague, and it was more then [sic] two years, before I proceeded further.”) A quick look at some online scientific works by Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell suggests both of them were perfectly happy using “I” as well, two hundred years after Newton.
In fact, Darwin and Maxwell appear to use both first-person-singular and the pedagogic “we”, as in this passage from Darwin’s book on coral reefs: “… as we have just seen, the presence in most cases of upraised organic remains of a modern date. I may here remark that the reefs were all coloured before the volcanoes were added to the map, or indeed before I knew of the existence of several of them.” (From Darwin’s book on coral reefs.)
I suspect the pervasive emphasis on passive voice and first-person-plural may be more of a 20th Century phenomenon.
The editorial community does not all think alike, and there is some common sense out there:
In the AIP Style manual, IIRC, they actually say not to indulge in “we” nor in passive, I think, saying it is pointless, stilted, etc.
BTW, I need to know: which publishers/Editors expect the forced passive/plural usage, and which do not?
great post!
The obsession with passive voice in scientific writing is frustrating after being punished repeatedly in Writing courses for daring to use the passive voice. It’s a schism I bring up repeatedly w/my Humanities colleagues.
Insistence on the passive voice can make scientific writing quite distasteful. Nevertheless, there seems to be this feeling one must write passively otherwise the content will not be taken seriously. There is a sense among students that being taken seriously demands phrases like: “It is easily seen that…A sharp increase is observed…” Stereotypical images of the prof w/the tweed jacket, or the lab rat w/the white lab coat come to mind.
The compromise for our stuff is: Materials and Methods are written in the passive voice. Write the meat in the active voice.
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/~cew2/KnightLecture.html
We treat the “We” used in single author papers as the royal version of I and we find it preferable in general.
I had to read Bacon’s Novum Organum once (although not in latin, thank Christ). It wasn’t the highpoint of my life.
I wrote a single-author paper for IEEE in which I used both “I” and “we” in the sense described above. The editor changed all the Is and some random wes into “the author”, as well as turning many active sentences into passive ones. Hilarity ensued, with gems such as: “The author needs single-photon detectors”.
Not that there’s anything wrong with splitting infinitives — I’m all for it — but I don’t think I split one. “Following” is a gerund serving as a prepositional object to the verb “confess”.
I also used “we” instead of “I” in my last single authored paper. I did think about this while writing the paper, but I found that replacing “we” by “I” everywhere made the article read awkward.
Sophia– Thx for the link. I should’ve known. I was lucky to have had Mermin for classical mech, and it was a fantastic experience. His book, “Boojums all the way”, has good commentary on how to write…and how not to write.
Unless you’re a woman who truly enjoys being conquered by a man, I just can’t imagine any woman (in her right mind, that is) wanting to sleep with a man with Francis Bacon’s mindset!
I wrote my most recent single author paper in the first person singular, and was told by the referee to change it because I sounded egotistical.
We were not amused.
But text was changed.
We have multiple personality disorder, so first person plural is always appropriate.
If professional scientists (such as yourself) agree that it is pointless to avoid first person in science writing, would you please inform high school science teachers. It was apparent to everyone in my class, as well as the teacher himself, that it was a pretty stupid system. But I was under the impression that that’s just how it’s done, so we had to go with it. Luckily, I never got good at it.
Cynthia #19: It was widely said at the time, I believe, that Bacon would himself have preferred not to lie with woman. Everybody wins!
Aaron Bergman (#16):
You’re right.
One day, I’ll learn to think before typing. Until that day comes. . . .
The passive disease afflicts grant offices, too. I wrote a classroom technology grant for $50K – quite a sizeable one for our small college. Since it would be reviewed by politicians who didn’t have science backgrounds (or a lot of patience), I wrote it in jargon-free, concise first person. Our college grants admin had this feedback:
Admin: “It sounds completely unprofessional. Write it in third person – that’s how all professional documents should be written.”
Me: “Changing the grant to third person will require passive voice, and introduce unnecessary wordiness in several places. Given the audience, I think it’s a bad idea.”
Admin: “Ha ha. No, it won’t. If you were an English major instead of a scientist, you’d know that third person and passive voice NEVER introduce wordiness to a document.”
Me: “I have a BA in English.”
Admin (whose degree is in Education Administration): “Well, if I was you, I wouldn’t admit to it.”