“THE test tube was carefully smelt.” I was astonished to read this sentence
in my 11-year-old son’s science notebook. At primary school his science reports
had been lively and vivid. But when he moved to secondary school they became
stilted and passive. This was no accident. His teachers told him to write this
way.
When I was at school, my science teachers made me write in the passive voice,
but I had no idea it was still going on. Ever since I was a graduate student at
Cambridge, I have thought the active voice—”I did”—far more
appropriate in scientific writing than the passive—”it was done”.
Experiments do not mysteriously unfold in front of impersonal observers. People
do science, and to portray it as a human activity is not to diminish it but to
show it as it is.
The passive style is not only misleading, it is also alienating. A young
medical student told me “it felt strange at first” when a lecturer asked her to
write her reports in the active. “But then it felt liberating,” she said.
“Suddenly I could be myself again, after years pretending I wasn’t there.”
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Recently I asked Frank Chennell, the coordinator of the Norfolk
Teacher-Scientist Network (TSN), if he could find out how local teachers and
scientists thought children should write science reports. Most teachers agreed
that, in line with the national curriculum, younger children should adopt a
direct style. But some believed that older pupils should use the passive. Most
local scientists favoured the passive for research papers.
When Lord May, the president of the Royal Society, read the results of this
survey in the TSN newsletter, he said he was “horrified” that the Norfolk
scientists favoured the passive. “I would put my own view so strongly as to say
that, these days, the use of the passive voice in a research paper is the
hallmark of second-rate work,” he says. “In the long run, more authority is
conferred by the direct approach than by the pedantic pretence that some
impersonal force is performing the research.”
I soon found that May’s strong views are shared by many other eminent
scientists, including the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees. Bruce Alberts,
president of the US National Academy of Sciences, has said he strongly favours
the active voice.
Most scientific journals accept papers in the active voice and some,
including Nature, positively encourage it. When I surveyed the current
issues of 55 journals in the physical and biological sciences, I found only two
that still required contributors to use the passive.
As far as I can tell, the passive style did not become fashionable in science
until the end of the 19th century. It was meant to make science seem more
objective, impersonal and professional. Before that, scientists generally used
the active voice. Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin certainly did. The heyday of
the passive in scientific literature was from 1920 to 1970. But while leading
scientists have abandoned this convention, many science teachers still insist on
it.
To find out more, I contacted the heads of science in 262 secondary schools:
212 state-maintained schools in Devon, Greater London (Camden, Ealing and
neighbouring boroughs), Greater Manchester (Rochdale and Bury) and
Nottinghamshire, and a random sample of 50 independent schools. I received
replies from 172 of them.
Overall, 45 per cent of the schools said they encouraged the use of the
active voice, while 42 per cent said they encouraged the passive. The remaining
13 per cent had no preference. There was a significant difference between
state-maintained and independent schools: 58 per cent of the independent schools
I surveyed encouraged the use of the passive, compared with 37 per cent of state
schools. Geographically, the proportion of passive-inclined state schools ranged
from 30 per cent in Devon to 41 per cent in London and Greater Manchester.
Some of those teachers who taught use of the active were enthusiastic
advocates. Others said they used the active out of necessity, and one head of
science in an inner-city comprehensive commented: “We’re lucky to get them to
write anything at all. It would be difficult to persuade students to write in a
style so very different from normal speech.” He implied that more state schools
would use the passive if they could.
Some teachers promote the passive because they think examination boards
require it. There is some truth in this. Of the three examination boards for
England, two encourage the use of the passive for sixth-form exams. The
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the government’s guardian of
educational standards in England, has no official position on the matter.
But most of the teachers who encourage the passive voice say they are simply
following convention. Clearly, they believe that leading scientists and journals
still prefer it to the active. This is an outdated view. “Primary and secondary
teachers should, without any reservation, be encouraging all their students to
be writing in the active voice,” says May.
What would happen if the Royal Society officially endorsed the use of the
active voice? Perhaps the QCA and the examination boards would follow suit. Then
hundreds of thousands of science students could stop pretending that they were
not really there during their experiments.
Science teachers in my survey who supported the active say it is “more
natural”. It “gives pupils ownership of their work” and “makes science more
personal and pupils more involved”. I agree. I believe the passive voice is
alienating. It mystifies scientific practice and is ugly and cumbersome.
The active is better at communicating what scientists actually do. Above all,
it is more truthful.
