Passive voice, first person pronouns and mental process verbs in the physical sciences reseach article

Banks, David

doi:10.4995/rlyla.2021.14434

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 28 publications

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“…Besides, contributing to an objective and formal tone, PV contributes to the authors' opinions and evaluation of a manuscript. In other words, the avoidance of using first-person references, such as «I», «we», «my», and «our», aims to prevent subjectivity (Banks, 2021;Swan, 1995). However, showing confident judgment in academic writing is necessary to show the authors' credible critical thinking, authority, and ownership on the content.…”

Section: Passive Voice and Authorial Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

“Expunge Virtually All Use of the Passive Voice”: How Does Style Guideline Affect Passive Voice Occurrences in Research Articles?

Fauziah,

Bashtomi

2024

JLE

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Background: The prevalence and impact of passive voice (PV) structures in research articles have garnered attention, particularly within the context of academic publishing guidelines. Some journals’ writing style guideline, for example, explicitly advises authors to eliminate passive voice instances from their manuscripts, prompting an examination of the extent to which this guideline influences authors' choices in different journal contexts. Purpose: This study aimed at comparing the frequency of passive voice (PV) structures used in research articles published by journals originating in Indonesia (henceforth, JOI) to those in research articles published by journals originating in English-speaking countries (henceforth, JOE). Method: Data were gathered from respected journals in Indonesia and the United Kingdom, both renowned for their excellence in language education and applied linguistics. After reviewing relevant literature and considering journal origins and author affiliations, we selected 34 articles (17 from each group) out of 66. We focused our analysis on the 'Introduction' and 'Method' sections, as these sections typically contain active voice in the former and passive voice in the latter. Other sections and peripheral elements were excluded. The analysis involved exporting PDFs to text files to count words and passive voice occurrences. We utilized a passive voice detector tool and manual analysis for accuracy. A t-test was conducted to compare the frequency of passive voice between the two journals. Results: The results indicated three main findings with respect to the research questions: 1) PVs in JOI occurred more frequently in the ‘Method’ than in the ‘Introduction’ section, 2) similarly, PVs in JOE occurred more frequently in the ‘Method’ than in the ‘Introduction’ section, 3) JOI comprised fewer sentences than JOE but the frequency of PVs in JOI was significantly higher than that in JOE. Conclusion: We inferred that the current guidelines seemingly affected the authors' choices of using PV. We also provided some suggestions on how to use AV and PV appropriately in the manuscript.

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Section: Passive Voice and Authorial Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

“Expunge Virtually All Use of the Passive Voice”: How Does Style Guideline Affect Passive Voice Occurrences in Research Articles?

Fauziah,

Bashtomi

2024

JLE

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Aspects of the contribution of systemic functional linguistics to ESP, with particular reference to the physical sciences research article

Banks¹

2022

asp

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language with reference to cognitive processes, we explain cognition by reference to linguistic processes" (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: x). So, cognitive and functional approaches are, as it were on the same road, but while one is travelling from A towards B, the other is travelling from B towards A, so they must meet somewhere. Formal approaches are somewhat apart, particularly since, in the wake of Chomsky, they tend to have as their object of study an idealized, and hence artificial, language, rather than a natural language. At the same time, all languages are encoded in form, so all theories will have to deal with form at some point, so there may be a meeting point even in this case.My object in this paper 1 is to attempt to show some of the ways in which I have found systemic functional linguistics to be useful in the study of specialized text. This is not intended to imply that this is to the exclusion of other approaches. All of the features that I shall look at can be studied within other frameworks, but I have found that systemic functional linguistics lends itself to this type of study. I shall take as my example for illustrative purposes the case of the physical sciences research article. Use of the passive voiceUntil fairly recently it was commonly believed that in the scientific research article writers avoided the use of first-person pronoun subjects in favour of the passive form. A number of studies (Barber 1962;Huddleston 1971; Banks 1994) suggested a passive rate of the order of 30% of finite verbs. However, over the last 15 years or so some studies have suggested that there is evidence of a fall in passive use (Seoane 2006; Seoane & Hundt 2018), while others suggest a rise in the use of first-person pronoun subjects (Hyland & Jiang 2016a, 2016b. In an attempt to see to what extent these claims are valid, I recently (Banks 2021) took a small sample of six randomly chosen articles from the Proceedings of the Royal Society A for the year 2018. This journal deals with the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences. The articles have between two and six co-authors. None of them are single-authored. The total number of coauthors is 23, 14 of whom have typically anglophone names. There are 13 institutional addresses provided by these authors, all but one in the UK, the exception being an address in Switzerland. For each article the journal gives three subject areas. The area of civil engineering occurs three times and environmental engineering and mathematical modelling twice each. The others were acoustics, applied mathematics, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, energy, fluid mechanics, geophysics, hydrology, mathematical physics, structural engineering, and wave motion.The sample has a total of 2808 finite verbs, of which 825 are passive in form, giving an overall passive rate of 29%, which corresponds to the rate that had been prevalent during the 20 th century. Taken on its own, this would seem to indicate that the rate of passive use has not changed. However, the overall rate m...

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Passive voice, first person pronouns and mental process verbs in the physical sciences reseach article

Cited by 2 publications

References 28 publications

“Expunge Virtually All Use of the Passive Voice”: How Does Style Guideline Affect Passive Voice Occurrences in Research Articles?

“Expunge Virtually All Use of the Passive Voice”: How Does Style Guideline Affect Passive Voice Occurrences in Research Articles?

Aspects of the contribution of systemic functional linguistics to ESP, with particular reference to the physical sciences research article

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