I also think that the passive voice often acts as glue that keeps a piece of writing together. Instead of all active sentences each demanding the attention of the reader, passive sentences are resting points. But of course you do not want a text completely composed of resting points.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004456.html

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I’ve never understood why the ‘royal we’ (which is what it sounds like most of the time) has to be used in science writing, it strikes me as archaic and a tradition that confuses things rather than elucidates them.

In fact, i’d love to see more papers where there is explicit disagreement between co authors. (eg Witten things that this 2 form has to be closed, but Vafa disagrees). ‘We’ tend to learn more from disagreement in Science than pure consensus, even if its regarding unimportant technical details.

The issue that Chad and Sean are referring to is not removing first-person sentences — at least not if they contain important information — but the idea that they must be rewritten so that “I” (or “we” even if it’s a multi-author paper) never appears. For example, this set of instructions on preparing abstracts for meetings of the Acoustical Society of America contains the following advice:

Use passives instead of pronouns “I” and “we,” e.g., “It was noted” instead of “We noted.”

which in this case makes things slightly wordier, the opposite of what you want for an abstract…

Peter — Of course I believe in using the first person when it is appropriate. For instance it is appropriate in an introduction or conclusion when explaining motivation, history of the problem, etc. But at least in my field, in the body of the article (i.e., when presenting new results), it is almost never appropriate. Authors often believe it is appropriate — I was one of these for many years. But then, at the urging of an older colleague, I played the game of removing all sentences with “I” or “we” from the body of one of my preprints. It didn’t change the true content of the article, and it made the article significantly shorter.

Bryant 1962 reports three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals; the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in “Politics and the English Language.”

So Orwell seems to honor his own law more in the breach than in the observance.

In a later post, Mark Liberman remarks that a quick analysis of E.B. White’s writing indicates a passive-voice frequency of about 20%, and shows how Winston Churchill (“a model of forceful eloquence”) used an even higher frequency in a dramatic narrative about 19th Century colonial wars.

The passive voice isn’t in itself good or bad, even if it does get overused sometimes in scientific writing.

Of course that’s shorter. And that’s a perfectly sensible way to write; no one (I think) is suggesting “Third person bad, first person good!”, or that all definitions, simple statements of fact, etc. must use the first person!

The problem arises when people (or the editors they deal with) think they need to elminate all trace of the first person from their writing, even when it’s the more natural and appropriate choice.

I may have got that slightly garbled…

“With her strange winds prowling round her like Circe’s panthers, some black, some white. With her strange, remote communications and her terrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terrible vibrations of wicket and beautiful electricity she throws about her, like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current of her demon magnetism seize one’s living tissue and change the peaceful life of one’s active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm and a new adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness.

This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely, so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without losing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight! It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls.”

Anyway, it depends on your purpose and audience, but in my experience, statements like “I will include these computer activities in my labs” and “Our students do not have access to modern equipment” are more direct and reader-friendly than “Participating faculty will include these computer activities in their labs” or “Students in the affected courses at University X do not have access to modern equipment.” In a part of the country where “intellectualese” is distrusted, I try to be plain-spoken, especially when asking for money.