Quote:
Originally Posted by DixieGal
Nuh-uh. Always active. I wrote and proofread scientific papers for 20 years.
|
It's certainly conceivable that things have changed in the last 20 years, but when I was writing scientific papers in the 1980s the rule was that you always, ALWAYS wrote in the passive. The argument was that you, as an experimenter, should not be an "active" part of the experiment, and what you did didn't actually matter.
Eg, it's better to say "the solution was agitated for 10 minutes" rather than "I agitated the solution for 10 minutes" because the only thing of importance is that the solution was, in fact, agitated, not that it's you who did the agitating.