Over at Faraday’s Cage, Cherish has had a Huck Finn moment with regard to paper writing style:
I know that I’m not supposed to use the first person plural when writing papers. Frankly Scarlet, I don’t give a damn. I am going to say, “we did this” and “we did that”.
This made me blink a little, because I’ve never thought that was a rule. In fact, one of the things I had beaten into my head when I was a grad student writing papers was that scientific papers ought to be written in the first person plural and the active voice.
There definitely seems to be a belief that scientific writing should be passive and impersonal, though. I’ve been told by students that other departments on campus insist that lab reports be written in the passive voice, and that the first person is to be avoided at all costs. So maybe this is a discipline-specific rule.
Which makes it a good topic for a three question poll:
What field of professional literature are you most familiar with?
Should papers be written using first person, second person, or third person pronouns?
Should papers be written in the active or passive voice?
Leave your answers in the comments. I’d also be interested to see if this depends on your career stage (do professors favor passive voice, while grad students are more active?), but that’s optional.
(Also, feel free to leave comments quibbling with the wording, pointing out choices that I left off, answering questions I didn’t ask, and blaming the Democrats in Congress for everything that’s wrong with academic writing. I don’t particularly want any of those things, but they’re inevitable, so I might as well mention them in the instructions…)