Welcome to the Publish & Flourish Listserv! Edited by Kim Pawlak, TAA Associate Executive Director kmpawlak@centurytel.net Listserv Archive

May 2007

Use of passive tense
by Tara Gray, presenter of the TAA-sponsored Publish & Flourish: Become A Prolific Scholar workshop

The following excerpt is from the book Writing at Work (1997:261) by Edward Smith and Stephen Bernhardt.

Use passive tense to focus on what happened rather than who did it.

Often there is nothing underhanded about not saying who or what is doing the action. Sometimes a writer simply wants to focus on the what of the sentence and not the who. For example, it is traditional in scientific writing to use the passive as a way of focusing attention on what happened, not on who did it:

It was found that corticosteroids reduce inflammation associated with arthritis.

Viscosity was increased until the gauges indicated a pressure of two pounds per square inch within the cylinder.

Here, the researcher may simply decide that it makes sense to focus on the results and procedures, not the person doing research. It would be pointless to write I found, or The experimenter found, or I increased the viscosity. Passive structures allow writer to focus on important information instead of on who did something.

Even scientists, however, know there are times to prefer active over passive. The best style guides, and the instructions to authors for very prestigious scientific journals, urge authors to use active structures when possible and even to use I or we when appropriate, as in the following examples:

We decided to test the hypothesis that reading time would be significantly increased when interline spacing was reduced to less than 2 mm.

We have adjusted the data to account for observation that atmospheric contaminants entered our "clean" room and left a thin film on the surface of the bearings.

In instances such as these, the active, personal constructions are clearly preferable, since what is being reported are instances of personal judgment. The active constructions appropriately highlight the researcher's role as a thinking, guiding presence.

For more ideas like these, read the excellent book by Richard Lauchman Plain Style: Techniques for Simple, Concise, and Emphatic Business Writing (1993).

Good luck with it: if you have any questions or comments about writing, please contact me at tgray@nmsu.edu. I'd love to hear from you and will answer your questions in a subsequent column.

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UC Press to use ScholarOne for peer review

University of California Press Journals Digital Publishing Division chose ScholarOne's Manuscript Central as its online peer review system for use by its editors and authors. Manuscript Central offers a number of features to address a variety of manuscript-submission and peer review requirements, and enables users to submit, review, annotate and format technical manuscripts in innovative ways.

ScholarOne, Inc.: Click here
UC Press: Click here

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About the Publish & Flourish Listserv

TAA's Publish & Flourish Listerv is now open to all of the association's workshop attendee-members, those of Tara Gray's "Publish & Flourish" workshop, Kenneth Henson's "Grant Writing" and "Writing for Publication" workshops, Elizabeth Boepple's "Creating Camera-ready Copy" workshop, and Robert Ginsberg's "Academic Publishing" and "Grant Writing" workshops. The focus of the listserv will remain the same -- to provide TAA's workshop attendees with ongoing support with their academic authoring pursuits.

The Publish & Flourish Listserv will allow you to maintain contact with Tara, Ken, Elizabeth and Robert, and others who took their workshops across the country. You can ask questions, seek further follow-up on their suggestions, and get input from others who took the workshops.

The listserv will also provide you with information tailored to academic authors: information on citations, answers to knotty grammar questions, and links to essays and other resources on problems and issues like writer's block, copyright, fair use, citation format, and other formatting and editing issues, from our workshop experts and other experts within the TAA community.

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