It has been some time
since I last posted here on the McCulley/Cuppan blog. Just like some other
things in my life, I simply got out of the habit. So, like my physical
workouts, I am looking to make blog posts a more regular part of my life.
With that said, onto the
question I want to consider in this post—why are most research documents
that cross my computer screen written in the passive voice? Literally, many,
if not all of the clinical research reports, much of the regulatory
documentation, and painfully all of the clinical research protocols are written
in the passive voice.
Why do I even bring this
topic up? Well, some researchers in the academic community feel that the use of
the passive voice (verbs that do not indicate who or what is doing the action)
can lead to writing where the sources or agents of action are not clear. This
is my big criticism of protocols, a class of documents centered on
characterizing events and agents.
These writing
researchers also comment that repeated use of the passive voice results in
texts, which are “flat and tedious” to read. From my very subjective
perspective, I have to agree with that last comment as I have certainly
seen my share of documents that fit this description.
It is worth noting here
too that reading research shows most readers prefer active voice,
especially readers for whom English is not their mother tongue.
The point of this blog
is not a grammar lesson (trust me I’d never do that as I almost fall asleep
from boredom when someone mentions the word grammar.) But just to be sure we
are all on the same page by what I mean with ‘passive voice’ versus ‘active
voice’; here is my explanation in a nutshell:
- In the active voice, the agent performing the action is
the grammatical subject of the sentence and the recipient of the action is
the grammatical object.
- The passive voice switches this around, making the
recipient of the action the grammatical subject and the agent the object
if the agent is even included.
Passive sentences that I
read by the truck load contain phrases such as these:
- The three arms in the study will be…..
- Training on diary completion will be provided to
patients…..
The worst abuse of
passive voice is the heavy use of state-of-being verbs combined with past
tense: (is, was, be) + (past tense) like the following examples:
- PDGF and its receptor (PDGFR) have been implicated in
the pathobiology of pulmonary hypertension in animal studies……….
- Wonderdrug has been shown to be an effective treatment
in XX disease.
- The molecular constructs most effective for
PI3K/AKT/MTOR pathway inhibition were shown to be.......
- Mortality at 24 weeks after first dose was to be
ascertained for………
Unfortunately,
it is way too common in protocol writing for the author to utilize passive
voice and fail to explicitly mention who will perform the act. Often the
all-important agent is missing from the discussion and the reader must
interpret who is the agent of a specified task. In numerous instances this will
not be problematic, but in other cases it can cause confusion that leads to
inquiries or missed tasks.
So back to the point of
this discussion. I ask this question about the habitual use of the passive
voice because many science journals, like Nature, and most of the leading style guides recommend
the active voice over the passive voice. So if the top-flight journals like
Nature and the leading style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style recommend writing in the active voice, then why do people
working in pharmaceutical and medical device companies still demand passive
voice as the default style pathway?
When I ask people in the
workshops I teach at various pharmaceutical and medical device companies why
they slavishly write in passive voice, the answers range from: “I did
not know that is the style I was using.” to “This is the way
science must be written.” Ignorance is never an acceptable excuse, but
to invoke the need to meet some mythical style-standard is absurd. The slavish
use of the passive voice in science writing is a self-maintained and
mutually-committed act drawn from a fairy tale. I use the term fairy
tale here with careful consideration. Fairy tales are about imaginary
worlds. Hereto we have a situation where people imagine what readers want and
prefer and routinely invoke the imaginary in defense of their personal or
organizational belief system about high quality scientific writing.
From my perspective, the
two leading reasons that the passive writing style is so broadly applied are:
- Many writers have only read documents written in this
style and are formally and informally conditioned to replicate the style.
A prevalent form of conditioning is teachers in the sciences, at levels of
the academic system, who demand their students write applying the passive
voice style.
- The power of precedence—what we did previously was
accepted or published; therefore it had to be good. So make this document
look, taste and smell like the previous ones.
The bottom line is
writing in this style is a habit and a bad habit at that.
I am working my way
through some papers addressing the psychological mechanisms that form and
maintain habits in work groups and organizations. Now I am looking for
references related to the meaningful steps necessary to mitigate or eliminate
these habits. When and if I find an effective elixir for this bad writing habit,
I will let you know.
