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Basic Scientific Writing in

English

Lecture 7

Professor Ralph Kirby

Faculty of Life Sciences

Extension 7323Room B322

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Active and passive voice for verbs

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Classically in science:

The following results were obtained . . . . .

We obtained the following results . . . . .

Which is active and which is passive

British English scientists tend to overuse the

passive compared to American English scientists.

Chinese 1stlanguage speakers very rarely use the

passive when writing a paper

Grammar checkers will highlight all passives as

wrong? Is the passive voice always wrong. No!

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Some scientists would say that you should

never use the passive voice. I disagree

You should avoid using the passive unlessyou have a reason to use it because it uses

more words and can make what you mean

more confusing

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When to use the passive When you cannot avoid it

The baby was born in the Maternity Hospital

The mother bore the baby in the Maternity Hospital

The 2ndsentence means the same, but is longer and reads poorly

The Petri dishes were made of plastic

The manufacturer made the Petri dishes out of plastic

Not the same meaning. Better still, Plastic Petri dishes

Why have I used Petri rather than petri in the

middle of the above sentences? The word petri ishighlighted by the spell-grammar checker!

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Emphasis

When you want to make the action rather than

the agent of the action the most important Streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic against

tuberculosis, was discovered by Waksman

Waksmandiscovered streptomycin, the first

effective antibiotic against tuberculosis.

When the agent is unknown or unimportant

Darwin most important work was published in

1859 X published Darwins most important work in

1859

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Rules for tense in scientific papers 1) When referring to previously published work, the results

have become knowledge and are true. Use the present tense

Streptomycin inhibitsM. tuberculosis

2) When referring to your own work, in general use the pasttense because it is not yet published

Under the conditions described earlier, streptomycin did not inhibitM.tuberculosis

3) Except!

In the Abstract

Because the abstract refers to the published paper

When presenting results as figure or tables

Because these are visible to the reader at the present time When presenting calculations or statistics

Because these results do not change

When stating a known truth

Water is wet

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Rules for using the person in scientific papers

Which should you use?

We showed that streptomycin inhibitedM. tuberculosis

Personal. More common than it used to be. Some journals use it more

than others. Can be very repetitive if used to much

It was shown that streptomycin inhibitedM. tuberculosis

None specific impersonal. Used a lot in many papers. Disadvantage,

does not say who it was shown by and when was this shown

The results showed that streptomycin inhibitedM. tuberculosis

General impersonal. Say where the information came from in general.

Disadvantage, not highly specific From Figure 1, it can be seen that streptomycin inhibitsM.

tuberculosis

Specific impersonal. Say exactly where the information can be found.

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Use the personal we, I, this researchgroup etc. when drawing an important

conclusion.Do not use it in the Materials and Methods.

Use it very rarely in the Introduction.

Use it sparingly in the Results.

Use it most in the Discussion

Do not use none specific impersonal

Use general impersonal if you have madeclear what results or experiments you mean.

Use specific impersonal as much asnecessary

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Examples. Change from active to passive

We examined the Southern blots for radioactive

bands

Our research group used radioactivity to detect the

protein

I detected a virus in the meat sample by PCR Examples. Change from passive to active

It might be expected that the treatment would be

effective

Inoculation was performed on 25 chickens

A trip for the purpose of collecting insects was

made in July 2002

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More real examples

Convert them, passive to active and

let us decide which is better

In this study a non-equilibrium approach was used to

discriminate between sequences The binding of the Lac-GFP fusion protein to

tandem lacoperator repeats was exploited to detect

the origin of replication

Extensive genetic variation among strains wasidentified using DNA microarrays

DNA microarrays have been used to compare

interstrain and interspecific variation in bacteria

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And even more real examples

Convert them, active to passive and

let us decide which is better

We have conducted a survey of nine Shewanellaspecies and assessed their relatedness to

Shewanella oneidensis We discuss both the size and the nature of the

contents of the Sodalisgenome and it is comparedtoE. coli

Most obligate intracellular bacteria are strictlyvertically transmitted to the progeny

Kuipers et alstudied pairs of isolates ofH.pylori,obtained 7-10 years apart, using RAPDS